Republican legislators set aside $125 million nearly four years ago for the Ohio Afterschool Enrichment program, or ACE. The program funds savings accounts that families can tap to pay for tutoring and other after-school programs. Lawmakers used some of the billions in COVID relief the state got, reasoning it could help kids lagging behind as a result of the pandemic.
But there’s evidence the accounts were too difficult for families to navigate. Just $47.9 million of the available ACE money was spent before the Trump administration revoked the COVID relief and apparently ended the program earlier this year.
Lacey Snoke, a spokesperson for the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce, shared numbers about the program with Signal on Tuesday, nearly two weeks after we first asked for the information. Snoke said that 97,000 accounts – controlled by 45,984 families – have at least $25 remaining.
Snoke said the ODEW’s leaders have reached out to their federal counterparts for clarification about where the program stands, including about whether the state will get permission to reimburse the outstanding claims parents submitted before the Trump administration pulled the plug.
“It is important to remember that the ACE program was created in 2021 in response to COVID-19, with a goal of providing additional enrichment opportunities for students whose education was directly impacted by the pandemic,” Snoke said in an email. “Funded by one-time, pandemic-era federal grant dollars, the program was always intended to be temporary.”
What the ACE program offered families
The ACE program gave eligible families $1,000 per family to spend on tutoring, museum visits and other educational programming. The money went into savings accounts, which families could access by making claims, similar to the health savings accounts run by insurance companies.
Parents have described practical problems in accessing the money. In many cases, account holders were required to pay up front, submit a claim and wait to get reimbursed.
Those policies were meant to prevent fraud seen in similar programs in other states, but they may have gone too far, according to Greg Lawson, a policy analyst for the Buckeye Institute, a conservative think tank in Columbus.
The Buckeye Institute is among the groups that support expanding educational savings accounts, including the creation of the ACE program. But Lawson said he’s been disappointed with how it has been implemented.
“If it turns out we didn’t get the money out the door, and then the parents don’t get reimbursed, that’s going to be a major problem,” Lawson said.
Lawson listed some problems with the ACE program, including how lawmakers set it up late in a budget process, giving state agencies little time to prepare for it, and issues the state had finding an experienced vendor to administer the accounts.
“I think what this has done is show us if we are going to go down this road, and I think there’s merit to this, we need to figure out clearly how to do it better,” Lawson said.
Who still is owed money from the ACE program
State officials didn’t say how many outstanding claims there are. But one of them was submitted by Leah Ross, a mother of four in Cleveland who contacted Signal with questions after reading about the program’s possible demise last week.
Ross said she believes she is out $300 that she spent enrolling her son in a summer swimming program that the state was supposed to have reimbursed had the federal funding not been cut.
“As a working person living in this time, I don’t have very high hopes that we’re going to get that money back,” Ross said.
Ross’ experiences with the program were similar to those of other families – she described it as well intentioned but laden with red tape. Ross, a nonprofit executive, used it to pay for summer programming for her kids, like summer camps and swim lessons, helping them have some supervision while she went to work.
But she said the money was difficult to access, requiring her to cover the costs months in advance. She wasn’t able to get reimbursed until after the programs happened, although she got the program’s vendor, Merit International, to be more flexible after speaking with someone with the company on the phone.
But mostly, Ross is hoping policymakers help figure out how to keep the program going.
“I hope that they can work it out. Because, like, it’s objectively a good support,” she said.