Scholarship Annual Report — the department's own account of the channel

Source. Ohio Department of Education and Workforce, 2025 Scholarship Annual Report, covering the 2024-2025 school year. Type. Primary source, published by the program administrator. Location. https://education.ohio.gov/getattachment/About/Annual-Reports/2025-Scholarship-Annual-Report.pdf.aspx?lang=en-US. About 1.3 MB, 22 pages, retrievable by a self-identifying agent.

What it contains. One section per program — Traditional EdChoice, EdChoice Expansion, Cleveland, Autism, Jon Peterson Special Needs — each with a summary, the authorizing Revised Code sections, eligibility in prose, the fiscal-year maximum award, participation, statewide expenditure, a participation-by-year chart, and a provider list.

The figures this corpus takes from it, all for 2024-2025:

Program	Students	Expenditure	Average award, as published
Traditional EdChoice	42,607	$283,149,735.14	$6,808.75
EdChoice Expansion	100,939	$492,867,235.98	$4,958.41
Cleveland	8,345	$55,155,295.70	$6,836.35
Autism	6,016	$160,018,883.30	$26,598.88
Jon Peterson	8,680	$103,944,388.15	not published

Jon Peterson’s expenditure is derived, not quoted: it is the sum of the report’s six disability-category figures, which the report displays as a chart without totaling. The other four are quoted.

Why it matters here. It is the only committed source that sizes the scholarship channel from the department rather than from statute. The four programs that publish a total come to $991,191,150.12; adding Jon Peterson’s derived $103,944,388.15 brings the channel to $1.095 billion, across 166,587 students. The two figures are kept apart because the round one is the quotable one and only the first is fully sourced — which is still the order of magnitude the deduction stub reasoned about when it ruled out a deduction hiding inside a $95.6 million residual.

Two things in it that do not reconcile # ↑ Contents

Recorded because both are visible in the document’s own numbers, and neither is explained in it.

The executive summary overstates its own parts. It says the five programs “collectively empowered the families of more than 175,000 students”. The five program counts it publishes sum to 166,587 — a gap of 8,413, about 5%. A student holding scholarships in two programs would push the sum the other way, so double-counting does not explain it.

Three of the four published averages are not expenditure over participation.

Program	Published average	Expenditure ÷ participants
Traditional EdChoice	$6,808.75	$6,645.62
EdChoice Expansion	$4,958.41	$4,882.82
Cleveland	$6,836.35	$6,609.38
Autism	$26,598.88	$26,598.88

Autism matches to the cent and the other three do not, each published figure sitting above the implied one by 1.5–3.4%. That pattern says denominator rather than arithmetic error — plausibly an average over students holding a full-year award rather than over everyone who used the program at any point during the year. The report does not say, so this corpus records the discrepancy and does not adopt the explanation.

There is one edition, and the archive says so # ↑ Contents

Asked whether a 2024 or earlier edition exists at a renamed address, this record now answers from the listing rather than from a filename pattern.

The Annual Reports page was read in full on 24 September 2026: 64 getattachment links, exactly one of them a Scholarship Annual Report. The Wayback Machine holds that page 74 times between 19 July 2017 and 17 June 2026, and its index of everything ever captured under /getattachment/About/Annual-Reports/ runs to 238 distinct files — of which exactly one carries “Scholarship” in its name, this one. So the absence is not a naming change and not a page this project failed to scrape: no consolidated scholarship report of any earlier vintage has ever been served from this directory.

What precedes it is a per-program lineage, not an earlier edition of the same thing. The archive’s index holds FY2016-JPSN-Board-Report.pdf, FY2017-JPSN-Annual-Report.pdf, JPSN-Report-FY20.pdf, FY23_JPSN_Annual_Report.pdf and FY24_JPSN_Annual_Report.pdf — the Jon Peterson program reporting on itself, as its own authorizing section requires — plus Ohio-ACE-Educational-Savings-Account-Report.pdf for a program this report does not cover at all. The last two JPSN editions are still on the live page beside this one, and are now extracted: JPSN Annual Report carries FY2023 and FY2024 for that one program.

That changes what the gap above the FY1997-FY2013 historical archive is. It is not a series this project has not looked for; there is no consolidated series to find. The consolidated five-program account begins with 2024-2025, and one program’s own reporting is what covers part of the decade before it — which is now partly read rather than only named, so the gap in this channel is FY2014 through FY2022 and Jon Peterson’s is FY2014 through FY2022 as well.

The charts fill the gap, and two of them change measure inside it # ↑ Contents

The report’s five participation-by-year charts are now read, which fills that gap for every program. None prints a value. They are vector drawings, so pdftocairo -svg gives each mark’s position in page points, and the gridlines the text layer labels give the scale. connect::fixtures::scholarship_charts reads them into scholarship-participation.csv, and each row carries its chart’s pupils-per-point so a reader can state a tolerance.

At a tenth of a point the charts reproduce all 42 values they share with a printed source. Those are the archive through FY2013, this report’s own FY2025 counts, and the three Jon Peterson editions. That calibration also shows what the charts drew, which is not always what the titles say. Traditional EdChoice and Cleveland are titled “participants” and draw the archive’s applications column through FY2013, missing its used column by 2.5 points or more every year. Autism draws used. Jon Peterson is titled “applications” and draws what its own editions call students. From FY2014 the charts are the department’s own system, and this record reads them as participants on the FY2025 match. The auxiliary services node is the first to use the series.

The two editions that are read also correct the shape of that lineage. They were not a rolling one-at-a-time replacement: three older JPSN editions were served from this page as late as June 2023 and gone by June 2024, and FY23 and FY24 were both exported from Word on one afternoon in March 2025. A lapse and a catch-up, which the JPSN record dates.

What it is not # ↑ Contents

It is not a per-district file, and it points at one this project has not found. The Jon Peterson section states that students came from 494 districts, over 80% of Ohio’s, and says a breakdown per district “is available here” — linking to a route on reports.education.ohio.gov that returns 404. This record read that 404 as a withdrawal, and the reading is void: probed 2026-09-15 on #10, every path on that host returns the byte-identical Angular shell, /robots.txt included, and the reports behind it are Power BI embeds behind an entitlement the portal’s anonymous token does not carry. A status code there is a property of the portal, not evidence about the file. What stands is narrower: the breakdown is cited by a current departmental document, and nothing this project can fetch carries it. The deduction stub records that route and one other, and what would reach them.

The second of the two has a public substitute that is not the same file: the EdChoice designated list is per district and per building, and is eligibility rather than participation. Nothing published answers which district a scholarship was charged against.

And it is not the only participation source any more. The historical archive carries FY1997 through FY2013 statewide, and counts applications and scholarships-paid separately — which is a second denominator for the same quantity, and the shape of evidence the guess above needs. It does not identify this report’s denominator; it establishes that the department has long kept two.

It is not the deduct era. Every figure is 2024-2025, under the Fair School Funding Plan, where each scholarship is its own funding unit paid directly. Nothing here bears on what a district lost when the mechanism was a deduction; that needs dew-payment-reports.