The corpus › Sources

EdChoice Designated List — which buildings' students may claim a scholarship

dew-edchoice-designated-list · cited by 3 nodes

Source. Ohio Department of Education and Workforce, Designated List 2026-2027, With Criteria. Type. Primary source, published by the program administrator. An eligibility determination rather than a report: this file is the designation, not a description of one. Location. https://education.ohio.gov/getattachment/Topics/Other-Resources/Scholarships/EdChoice-Scholarship/EdChoice-Resources/Designated-List-2026-2027-With-Criteria.xlsx.aspx?lang=en-US. 876 KB, eight sheets, retrievable by a self-identifying agent with no credentials. Registered as edchoice-designated-2627 and pinned by SHA-256.

What it contains. The Overview sheet is the list: 2,877 buildings across 606 districts, keyed on district IRN and building IRN, each carrying its designation and every input to it — the two statutory criteria, three years of bottom-20% Performance Index flags, three years of Title I formula shares and their average, an academic-distress flag, grade levels served and an open/closed status.

513 buildings in 78 districts are designated for 2026-2027. So eligibility is concentrated: one district in eight has a designated building at all, and the other 528 have none.

Six further sheets carry the criteria’s own inputs, and all six are extracted. PI Ranking 2023, 2024 and 2025 rank every building the department ranks by Performance Index — 9,080 rows, a three-year building-level panel at the precision the ranking is actually decided on, where the report card carries one year at one decimal place. Title 1 2024, 2025 and 2026 give each of 611 districts a Title I formula count decomposed into census poverty, neglected, delinquent, foster and TANF children against its 5-to-17 population — the first held source in this repository for Ohio’s Title I formula counts at all.

Together they make the whole determination reproducible from raw counts rather than from the department’s own flags. It reproduces, exactly, in all 2,877 rows. What that costs is three readings the file states nowhere, and the third of them is a finding about the file: see below.

Why it matters here. It is the public substitute for the nonpublic-data-historical-ed-choice-designated-list route recorded in deduction — a portal route this project has not reached, once read here as withdrawn and not shown to be: that host answers every path with the same application shell, so its 404 says nothing about the report (#10). And it is the first per-district file in this repository about the scholarship channel. It does not replace what that route carries: this is who may claim, not who did, so it answers a different question — but it answers it per district, which nothing else here does.

One column is a dated fact, and the date is in the file Contents

The workbook’s own docProps/core.xml gives dcterms:created and dcterms:modified as 13 November 2025, thirty-four minutes apart — made in one sitting, unrevised since, and the live file is still byte-identical to it as of 15 September 2026.

That date matters for exactly one of the twenty columns. Every other is an arithmetic on the six sheets beside it, so it is as current as its inputs and cannot drift. Academic Distress School is not: R.C. 3310.03(C) makes a student eligible “if the student’s resident district is subject to section 3302.10”, so the column records whether a commission exists, and nothing in the file computes it. Strictly, it records something slightly different from what (C) says. R.C. 3302.103(E)(1) takes a district implementing its improvement plan out of R.C. 3302.10, and both flagged districts were on their plans when this file was written. What the flag tracks is whether the commission still exists, which is R.C. 3310.03(E)(2)‘s test for stopping first-time awards, and 3302.103(E)(3) keeps the commission in existence through the plan.

Every plan-year edition reads it that way, and the department’s rule says so. Read on 2 October 2026, the four editions run as follows:

OAC 3301-11-03(A), effective 15 June 2023, has the department publish the buildings meeting division (A), (B) or (C) of R.C. 3310.03, and “remove from the list any school building that has ceased operations or fulfills the criteria described in division (E)”. So a building enters on (C) and leaves only on (E). The rule writes “section 3301.03”, which governs the state board’s members, so the cross-reference reads as a slip for 3310.03. The rule postdates the 2022-23 list, and neither it nor LSC’s final analysis of H.B. 110 mentions 3302.103(E)(1). LSC describes the plan years and EdChoice separately and never connects them.

It is maintained, and Lorain proves it. Three districts have held a commission under the current R.C. 3302.10. Lorain City (IRN 044263, fifteen buildings — not 047076, which is Pettisville Local) is flagged no, its commission having been dissolved by H.B. 33 on 4 July 2023. So the department recomputes this column rather than carrying it forward.

And it went stale six weeks after it was written. East Cleveland City (IRN 043901, five buildings) is flagged yes. In late December 2025 the director released the district from commission oversight on a majority of its plan benchmarks, and R.C. 3302.103(F)(2) dissolves the commission on exactly that. (This entry used to cite R.C. 3302.10(N)(1), which did not apply to a district on its plan.) So R.C. 3310.03(E)(2) had already stopped first-time Option A awards there before the 2026-2027 school year this list governs opened. See Academic Distress Commission — the department's commission page for the notice and its dating.

What the staleness costs is nothing, and that is worth stating as precisely as the defect. All five East Cleveland buildings also satisfy Option B — bottom twenty per cent in two of three rankings, Title I average 48.9% — so they are designated on the derived route regardless. Recomputing the designation while honoring Option A only for Youngstown leaves all 513 designations standing. The entire load-bearing surface of the unreproduced column is two buildings, both Youngstown’s Rayen Early College schools, and Youngstown’s commission is the one that still exists.

Pinned in crates/dispersion/tests/the_one_column_the_designation_reads_is_a_dated_fact.rs, which also records why reproducing R.C. 3302.10(A)(1)‘s trigger would not audit this column: the trigger predicts establishment and the column reports existence. East Cleveland is the demonstration — released on an overall three stars, well above the trigger, and flagged yes anyway.

The designation is checkable, and the check finds a rule the file does not state Contents

DESIGNATED is exactly Option A OR Option B — 2 buildings by Option A alone, 495 by Option B alone, 16 by both, and no building designated by neither. Option A is the academic-distress route and is identical to the Academic Distress School column in all 2,877 rows.

Option B’s criteria are R.C. 3310.03(A)(1): bottom-20% Performance Index “for at least two of the three most recent consecutive rankings”, and a district in which “an average of twenty per cent or more” of its students were in the Title I formula over three consecutive years. Taken literally, that rule disagrees with the department’s own Option B column on four buildings — Highview 6th Grade Center in Middletown City, Willyard Elementary in Ravenna City, Ripley Union Lewis Huntington Junior High, and Beallsville High School in Switzerland of Ohio Local. All four meet both stated criteria and all four are marked No.

All four are Closed or Inactive. There are fifteen such buildings in the file and not one of them is designated. Adding that condition makes the identity exact in all 2,877 rows:

Option B = bottom-20% PI in two of three years and Title I ≥20% across three years and the building is open.

The workbook applies that third condition and states it nowhere. It is not in the criteria the statute lists either — it follows from the premise in front of them, that the student “is enrolled in a school building operated by the student’s resident district”, which a closed building has nobody to satisfy. Pinned in crates/dispersion/tests/ rather than left as a reading.

The 2025 ranking sheet is not the population the 2025 flag was cut from Contents

The bottom-20% flag is ceil(0.20 × N) of the buildings R.C. 3310.03(A)(1)(a) admits — those “operated by city, local, and exempted village school districts”, the pilot-project district’s excluded. In 2023 and 2024 that is the sheet itself: neither holds a community school, a STEM school or a Cleveland building, so a fifth of the sheet is a fifth of the eligible population and the flags follow.

The 2025 sheet is different. It ranks 3,237 buildings, 359 of which the statute excludes — 258 community schools, 8 STEM schools and Cleveland’s other 93 — across 256 LEAs that appear in neither of the other two years, and a community school holds rank 4. A bottom fifth of it flags 646 buildings and misses 163 of the 576 the department flags.

The department’s flag is right all the same: 576 is a fifth of 2,877, which is exactly the sheet filtered to Public School outside Cleveland and carrying an index. So the ranking was done on the statutory population and published on a wider one. That is the same defect as the Option B column above — a rule applied more narrowly than the file shows — and it is the reason a reader taking the sheet at face value cannot reproduce the most recent of the three flags.

The Title I criterion is a census poverty rate under another name Contents

The Title 1 sheets decompose the count R.C. 3310.03(A)(1)(b) tests, and 96.7% of it, across three years and 611 districts, is census poverty — the Census Bureau’s estimate, dated in each sheet’s own column headings to two years before the school year it decides and paired with an October collection one year behind. The oldest of the three editions rests on a 2021 estimate.

The four categories Ohio collects itself come to 3.3%. Two barely exist: the delinquent column is never a positive number in any of the three editions, and TANF falls from 930 children statewide to none at all between the first and the second, unannounced. But because they can only add, they can only move a district over the twenty per cent bar — and they move 16 districts over it, six of which hold designated buildings. 31 designations rest on the 3.3%.

The Title I sheets carry five districts the list does not, for two different reasons Contents

611 against the Overview’s 606 and the report card’s 607. Cleveland Municipal accounts for one and is the statutory exclusion described below — it is ranked in 2025 and report-carded like any district, and stands sixth of 611 on the criterion it is excluded from.

The other four are absent from every ranking sheet and from the report card as well: Kelleys Island Local, Middle Bass Local, North Bass Local and College Corner Local. That is not an exclusion. A Title I formula count is a count of resident children and needs no building, so a district that operates none the department rates still has a count — North Bass Local carries a row and a 5-to-17 population of zero. Reporting “five districts are missing” as one fact would merge a statutory exclusion with an absence of buildings.

The Title I column tests an average, and its name says otherwise Contents

Title 1 Percent 20% or Above Across 3 Years reads like a condition on each of the three years. It is not: it is Title 1 Average >= 0.20, in all 2,877 rows, which is exactly what R.C. 3310.03(A)(1)(b) requires — “an average of twenty per cent or more”. Reading the column name literally instead misclassifies 164 buildings, all of them districts that clear the bar on average and fall under it in one year.

Title 1 Average is itself the mean of the three yearly shares beside it, to the last place, in every row; and it is constant within a district, because it is a district figure repeated onto each of that district’s buildings rather than a building one. That is why the criterion is a district one and the designation is a building one: two buildings in the same district can differ only through their Performance Index.

Cleveland Municipal is the one district that is not in it Contents

606 districts, against the 607 the report card carries. The missing one is Cleveland Municipal, and the reason is statutory rather than clerical. R.C. 3310.03 opens by making a student eligible only if “the student’s resident district is not a school district in which the pilot project scholarship program is operating”, and closes division (A)(1) by directing that “when ranking school buildings … the department shall not include buildings operated by” such a district. Cleveland is the pilot project district — it has a scholarship program of its own, cataloged in this corpus as cleveland-scholarship — so no Cleveland building can be designated, and the department’s file does not rank them at all.

The exclusion is therefore observable: a statutory sentence and a row count that agree. Pinned alongside the identity above.

What it is not Contents

It is not participation. A designated building is one whose students may apply. Nothing here says a scholarship was awarded, used, or charged anywhere, and the portal route that would have said so is still unreached — a report behind an entitlement, not a file that was taken down.

It is not EdChoice Expansion. Expansion eligibility is income-based and turns on no building at all, so a designated list has nothing to do with it. This file bears on the traditional program only, which is the smaller of the two: 42,607 students against 100,939 in 2024-25. Note that R.C. 3310.032 carries the same pilot-project exclusion, so Cleveland’s absence here is not the whole of it — a Cleveland resident is outside both EdChoice programs, not merely outside the building-based one.

It is not the whole series. Three editions are held — 2024-2025, 2025-2026 and 2026-2027 — and 2023-2024 is named in the archive and not retrievable. See below. The 2022-2023 edition has been read from the archive, for its distress column only, and is not committed.

The page lists one edition at a time, and the archive says so too Contents

The EdChoice Resources page was read in full on 24 September 2026 rather than probed for guessed filenames. It carries 47 getattachment links and exactly one designated list: the 2026-2027 edition. The other 46 are forms, fact sheets and guidance, most of them in seven languages. There is no archive section, no “prior years” list, and no second workbook of any vintage.

Two corrections to the guess that opened this question. The prior editions spell with in lower case — Designated-List-2025-2026-with-Criteria.xlsx — and only 2026-2027 capitalizes it, so a probe built from the current filename’s pattern was testing a name the department never used. Under either spelling all three predecessors return this host’s genuine 404, a 1,245-byte page, byte-identical across all three and distinguishable from the reports portal’s application shell.

So the department is not renaming the file; it is deleting it. That is the finding, and it is one the previous text could not make: the listing carries one edition because the page carries one edition, and the URL a departed edition used answers with a real 404 rather than a redirect.

The Wayback Machine holds the page 17 times between 30 November 2023 and 16 April 2026, and the workbooks themselves:

EditionCapturesHeld
2023-2024none of the file; linked from page captures onlyno
2024-202520240928123347, 20250309093228, then 404 from 20250714111157yes
2025-202620250309082659, 20250714111029, 20250717154725, 20250901074111yes
2026-202720260120123937served live

Every capture of a given edition is byte-identical to every other — one SHA-256 per edition across four captures and three — so an edition is a fixed file and the earliest capture is the whole of it. The 9 March 2025 captures also date the deletion: both 2024-2025 and 2025-2026 were being served that day, and 2024-2025 was gone by 14 July. A fourth edition is therefore named and not retrievable: 2023-2024 is linked from captures of the page and was never itself crawled.

Registered as edchoice-designated-2526 and edchoice-designated-2425 under dew-scholarship-reports, pinned by SHA-256, and admissible under “An archived source is still a source”: the publisher no longer serves them, the reason is its release model rather than a correction, and each reproduces the department’s own arithmetic in every one of its rows — the designation from its two options, Option B from its criteria including the unstated open condition, the window flag from its year columns, and the Title I average from the three shares beside it.

Two editions make eligibility a change rather than a snapshot Contents

460 designations, then 494, then 513, over 2,937, 2,906 and 2,877 listed buildings, in 62, 68 and 78 districts. All three editions carry 606 districts, so the pilot-project exclusion is constant and the growth is in designations, not coverage.

Every building that entered the designated set entered through Option B. 42 entries in 2025-2026 and 38 in 2026-2027, and not one of the 80 holds Option A. Departures are 8 and 19, of which exactly one across the two years held the academic-distress route. So the commissions are nearly inert as a margin: the route that moves buildings in and out is the derived one, three years running.

Entries and departures are counted apart from delistings, which is what keeping all 2,877 rows buys: a building that stops being designated and a building that stops being listed are different events, and only 1 departure in each transition is the second kind.

The pair also settles the open-building condition above. On one edition it was a rule inferred from four rows; on three it is the department’s practice, applied on 1, 7 and 4 rows, with no closed or inactive building designated in any edition.

Two layout findings the editions disagree on Contents

2024-2025 ranks two Performance Index years, not three, and its own heading says so. R.C. 3310.03(A)(1)(a) asks for the bottom twenty per cent “for at least two of the three most recent consecutive rankings”; that edition’s column reads Bottom 20% PI Ranking Across 2022 and 2023 School Years against Across Two of Prior Three Years in both later editions. Two of two is a materially easier test than two of three, and the fixture keeps the difference in the column name — bottom_20_pi_two_of_two — rather than flattening it.

A year a building was not ranked is blank, not No — 25 cells in 2024-2025 and 42 in 2025-2026, online academies, early learning centers and buildings that had not opened. The 2026-2027 edition writes No in all three of its year columns and leaves nothing blank, so this is a distinction the department stopped making rather than one it never made. The blank survives into the fixture, because a building that was outside the ranking is not a building the ranking cleared. The window column reads it as a year outside the bottom fifth, in every row of both editions.

And the missing space is new. Title 1Formula Average in the 2026-2027 Option B heading is this edition’s alone: both archived editions spell it Title 1 Formula Average.

Pinned in crates/dispersion/tests/the_editions_the_page_stopped_listing.rs.

Cited by Contents

Academic Distress CommissionCleveland Scholarship and Tutoring ProgramTraditional EdChoice Scholarship