DAYTON | Dayton likely will be the only Ohio district in which all incoming kindergarten students and most high school freshmen will not be allowed to receive vouchers to escape low-scoring public schools.

And students attending low-scoring charter schools also will not be eligible.

Ohio Department of Education officials, in a meeting for Dayton private schools Monday, said the school district's peculiar method for assigning students to schools may force the state to treat students here differently.

State lawyers are in talks with the district to try to interpret how the legislation, which passed last summer that expanded vouchers statewide, applies here.

Lawmakers approved 14,000 vouchers — tax money families can use for private schools — for students in persistently low-scoring schools.

The problem is that the law assumes students are assigned to schools based on neighborhood boundaries. But in Dayton, families can select any district school through an assignment lottery.

The law states that students attending schools rated in the lowest state category of "academic emergency," because of poor state test scores for three years, may receive a voucher. The state will pay up to $4,250 for private elementary school or $5,000 for private high school. The program begins in fall 2006.

Dayton has seven schools on the state's list where all current students attending can apply for a voucher — Belle Haven, Edison, Fairview, Hickorydale and McNary elementary schools, plus Dunbar and Belmont high schools.

Students at charter schools, even those that have been in academic emergency for three years, are not eligible for vouchers.

Kimberly Murnieks, the voucher program's chief officer, said the state's rationale is that those families already have choices — they can select another charter or public school at any time.

Private schools can sign up to accept voucher students beginning Jan. 1 and students can begin applying for vouchers in March.

To seek a voucher, students from low-scoring schools should first gain admission to a private school that accepts vouchers. Then the school must assist them to apply for the voucher.

Students are eligible for the voucher only if they are attending a low-scoring school when they apply and are still enrolled there when they are awarded the voucher, probably during the summer.

In other districts, families with children who will enter kindergarten at a low-scoring school next fall are also eligible for vouchers. But because Dayton's schools do not draw from feeder neighborhoods and families can request other schools through the lottery, the state probably will not allow new kindergartners to request vouchers, Murnieks said.

"The intent of the law is to help students who are in persistently underperforming schools now," she said. "It's all about what school you are attending now."

For that reason, only a handful of freshmen at Belmont and Dunbar next year can apply for vouchers, even though all of their classmates in grades 10 to 12 will qualify.

That's because the law will only consider where students attended last year when they were in eighth grade. The only Dayton school with eighth-graders that is low scoring enough to qualify its students for vouchers is Belle Haven Elementary.

For more about the voucher program, called EdChoice, go to edchoice.ohio.gov.