A bill to reduce the bureaucratic hurdles facing the families of special-needs children is now headed to Gov. Kevin Stitt to be signed into law.

 Since 2010, Oklahoma’s Lindsey Nicole Henry Scholarships for Students with Disabilities (LNH) program has allowed students to use state tax dollars to pay for private-school tuition. Those eligible are primarily children with special needs, such as autism, although the program also benefits foster children, adopted children, and children from military families. The scholarships range from $4,196 to $22,236 per child, based on a child’s diagnosis.

However, children cannot currently receive an LNH scholarship until they have been in the public-school system for at least one year.

Senate Bill 105, by state Sen. Julie Daniels and state Rep. Chad Caldwell, eliminates the one-year requirement for Oklahoma children to receive an LNH scholarship.

Daniels urged lawmakers to “take away the one artificial barrier” that stands in the way of Oklahoma families whose children may not receive a quality education without an LNH scholarship. Supporters of SB 105 have noted that some public school officials have openly acknowledged to parents that they cannot appropriately serve their special-needs children.

Even so, the bill drew opposition from Senate Democrats.

State Sen. Julia Kirt, an Oklahoma City lawmaker who leads the Senate Democratic caucus, suggested lawmakers should be worried about the potential cost of the LNH program once SB 105 becomes law, since lawmakers cannot predict how many children will have autism or other special needs in any given year.

“With the change, it actually opens up the program to more students, so we would expect a bigger first-year impact,” Kirt said.

But Daniels noted the program has been in existence since 2010 without causing major financial problems.

“We understand that it’s unpredictable,” said Daniels, R-Bartlesville. “I think the minority leader will recall I said more than once that right now this is only 1,500 students in the state, so it is my opinion that this will be a small number of students and of course we can’t predict the range of the scholarship they will receive.”

The amount of money provided for LNH scholarships since the program’s creation is a tiny fraction of total funding provided to Oklahoma public schools during that time. It’s estimated that about $70 million in LNH scholarships have been provided, combined, from 2011 to the 2023-2024 school year. The total funding provided to public schools from all sources—state, federal and local—has been more than $90 billion combined during that time.

That means for every $100 provided to public schools since the creation of the LNH program, about seven pennies have gone to LNH scholarships.

In the 2023-2024 school year, the most recent for which data is available, the LNH program provided $12.2 million in scholarships to 1,557 students for an average LNH scholarship of $7,866 per student.

That’s substantially less than the average per-pupil revenue provided for all public-school students.

According to financial data reported by schools to the state’s Oklahoma Cost Accounting System (OCAS), new revenue in Oklahoma public schools reached $9,600,703,488 in the 2023-2024 school year. Since student enrollment was 698,923 that year, that comes out to an average of $13,736 per pupil.

State Sen. Carri Hicks, D-Oklahoma City, dismissed the LNH program as a “giveaway” to the families of children with special needs and argued that state officials “won’t have anything to show for it.”

But LNH families have spoken out, repeatedly and publicly, on how the program has been life-changing for their children, who were not receiving the proper education and services in their local public school but did in a private school.

In 2022, Sheerean Aryan noted that her two sons qualified for therapy in public schools, but did not receive that aid until LNH scholarships allowed them to shift to a private school.

“They were owed those services for two years,” Sheerean said, “and they did not receive them.”

During House debate on SB 105, Caldwell read aloud a letter from one parent whose children received LNH scholarships.

The parent’s message stated: “I would give up every cent of the Lindsey Nicole Henry (scholarship) along with everything I have for my daughter not to have written a suicide note and to not have a disability that involves her taking 11 medications a day to keep her seizures and migraines at bay. I would give up everything I have to not have a son who needed nine surgeries in his first two years of life, and to have been taught how to read. Beyond a shadow of a doubt, Lindsey Nicole Henry saved my daughter’s life and changed the trajectory of my son’s.”

In 2022, Candace Cronin discussed how her then-six-year-old daughter’s life had changed after being able to attend a private school thanks to an LNH scholarship.

“She can communicate,” Cronin said. “She understands. She is awesome at reading. I mean, she is like one of the top five in her class in reading. And just two years ago, the girl couldn’t even talk.”

Parents have also spoken publicly of the harm imposed on their children by the one-year delay, which has forced some families to effectively waste of year of their child’s life to qualify for an LNH scholarship.

“I was beholden to this system that required me to put my child back into a school that had already failed him, severely, for two years,” Kandice Jeske, who has a son with several diagnosed learning challenges, said in 2024.

SB 105 passed the Oklahoma Senate on a 32-9 vote. The bill now proceeds to the governor.