Catastrophic Cost Reimbursement
The catastrophic cost program is open March 6, 2023 - April 28, 2023 for use by traditional school districts, community schools and JVSD’s to submit reimbursement requests for costs exceeding the threshold to educate preK-12 students, including any student in Grade 23, with disabilities in Categories 2-6 during the 2021 - 2022 school year. For traditional school districts, in most cases the students are those who reside in and are educated by that school district. However, if another school district or career tech center educates the student and files excess cost against the resident school district, that district may request catastrophic cost reimbursement of the excess cost filed against it if the cost exceeds the threshold. In addition, traditional districts, which enrolled nonresident students with disabilities for whom tuition and excess cost could not be charged to the district of residence pursuant to RC 3313.64(F), may request catastrophic cost reimbursement for those students.
Catastrophic Aid is available as a supplemental payment to districts, joint vocational schools, and community schools for special educational students in funding categories 2-6. This reimbursement is available to the financially responsible district or school for any child in categories 2,3,4, or 5 whose educational and related expenses exceeded $27,375, and any child in category 6 whose expenses exceeded $32,850 in the prior fiscal year.
Applications must use the calculation spreadsheet and districts will include only that spreadsheet as initial support documentation as a multiple line item document. After the area coordinator reviews the information submitted, he or she will determine if any additional support documentation is needed to approve the application.
FY22 costs from all funds may be reported when requesting catastrophic cost reimbursement, whereas only costs from the General Fund may be reported for excess cost. Since the program automatically populates the regular education teacher cost, administrative cost and staff support cost as a per capita cost from the General Fund, you may override those costs with supporting documentation if some or all the costs were from funds other than the General Fund by entering specific costs for those categories.
The deadline for filing requests for catastrophic cost reimbursement is April 28, 2023. Please submit your requests as soon as possible to give area coordinators adequate time to review and approve the applications. Our goal is to approve applications in time for the reimbursements to be paid before the end of the FY23 fiscal year, but every application (over 15,200 statewide last year) must be individually reviewed and approved, which is a time-consuming task.
All applications for reimbursement must be submitted through the School Finance application within the OH|ID Account. The User Manual and spreadsheet for uploading students and their costs are below.
| Enrollment dates |
07/01/2021 - 06/30/2022 |
| Program open date |
03/06/2023 |
| Deadline to submit application |
04/28/2023 |
*Dates subject to change.
Last Modified: 3/16/2023 12:50:14 PM