J. Nelson – Writer

The West Virginia Legislature convenes this week with the Republican Party once again in the supermajority.

Just as Donald Trump and his followers have promised to attack education at the federal level, West Virginia Republicans have spent the last several years systematically destroying public education in the Mountain State. Their most effective tool to date has been the Hope Scholarship, and I fully expect them to expand this program even more during the 2025 legislative session.

The Hope Scholarship is an educational voucher program that allows students and their families to receive the money that the public school system would have gotten from the state. So if a child leaves the public school system and gets the Hope Scholarship, that child and his/her family gets West Virginia tax dollars to use for “educational” expenses, and the school system the child leaves does not get any of the tax dollars that had been allocated for that student.

Right now, kids who would be entering kindergarten can receive the Hope Scholarship without ever having been enrolled in public schools. And according to a West Virginia Center on Budget and Policy fact sheet, during the program’s first year, kindergarten-aged participants outnumbered all other grade levels six to one, so “we can reasonably conclude that many of these families would have attended private school with or without access to the Hope Scholarship.”

When the voucher program was first implemented in 2021, the Hope Scholarship gave recipients $4,400 and only children who had previously been enrolled in a public school qualified. For the 2023-24 school year, it gave $4,900 per student, totaling $22.3 million to 5,443 students. The Legislature had to approve an additional $27 million to cover the ballooning costs of the program.

West Virginia Watch gives us an impressive breakdown of how our tax dollars were spent on private, personal, and religious enterprises.

For the 2023-24 school year:

• 77% of total funds went to non-public schools, including religious and unaccredited schools (roughly $17 million)
• Funds spent in 12 states other than West Virginia
• $210,000 to non-public schools in Virginia
• $20,000 in Utah for “education services”
• Over $7,000 in New Mexico
• $608,000 on laptops and computers
• $308,000 on tablets and iPads
• $507,000 on curriculums
• $110,000 on art supplies
• Just under $19,000 on physical education supplies
• $16,000 on music equipment
• Just under $5,000 for water tables

Hope Scholarship dollars can also be used for tutoring, textbooks, school supplies, “off the shelf” curriculums, and “educational” field trips. For example, in the 2022-23 school year, the Oglebay Zoo and West Virginia Golf Association were paid with Hope Scholarship funds, as I found in past research.

Based on the Hope Scholarship Annual Review — despite the persistent myth that education vouchers are the great equalizer for poorer, rural counties — in general, the most populous counties have the most recipients:

• Kanawha County (population: 174,000; Charleston) — 720 scholarships
• Berkely County (135,000; Martinsburg) — 439
• Monongalia County (108,000; Morgantown) — 278
• Cabell County (91,000; Huntington) — 289
• Wood County (82,000; Parkersburg) — 357
• Raleigh County (71,000; Beckley) — 308
• Harrison County (64,000; Clarksburg) — 254
• Jefferson County (60,000; Charles Town, Shepherdstown) — 249
• Mercer County (57,000; Bluefield) — 131
• Putnam County (56,000; Hurricane) — 247
• Marion County (55,000; Fairmont) — 161
• Ohio County (40,000; Wheeling) — 235
• Fayette County (38,000; Fayetteville) — 179

Logan County stands as a bit of an outlier with a population of roughly 30,000 but 236 Hope Scholarship recipients, and some of the smallest counties by population have a handful more recipients than their more moderate-sized counterparts. However, as a rule of thumb, West Virginia’s most populous counties are the greatest beneficiaries of school vouchers.

Here’s why that matters: West Virginia allocates state funding for schools based on enrollment. In general, more populous counties (i.e., more students to enroll) receive more state funding for schools, and therefore have better public school systems. (I acknowledge this is not always the case, as total population isn’t always a good indicator of school-age children.)

Since the most populous counties are receiving the most Hope Scholarships, that means the educational “wealth” is not being redistributed to the more rural or poor counties with struggling school systems the way Republicans promised. In fact, McDowell County, one of the state’s poorest counties, had zero Hope Scholarship recipients.

And it will only get worse: For the 2026-27 school year, the Hope Scholarship will expand to all school-aged kids living in West Virginia. That includes students who have never been in the public system and therefore have no associated tax dollars already allocated. Where will the money to pay for those education vouchers come from?

I can’t fault families for wanting the best for their children, but the Hope Scholarship does more overall harm than good.

On a practical level: There are too few guardrails to ensure that the money is being spent on actual educational materials and accredited schools and to keep the money from flowing out of state. (See above.) Significant sums of scholarship money are going to unaccredited schools.

On top of that, the cost for the Hope Scholarship is already ballooning. School voucher programs from other states show how the costs increase exponentially over time, especially as eligibility expands. A voucher program in Arizona went from under $10 million its first year to over $70 million (per academic year) in its eighth. West Virginia is already on track to spend over $40 million for its fifth year ($22 million this year plus the additional $27 million already approved for next year). Where does that money come from when legislators insist on cutting tax revenue and it can’t (or shouldn’t) come from the state’s education fund?

At the same time that the Legislature is making it easier for people to be paid to “homeschool” their kids, lawmakers are either easing homeschool accountability requirements or resisting policies designed to protect “homeschooled” children from abusive families, like in the cases of Raylee Browning and Kyneddi Miller. (I will definitely discuss them in a future post, but feel free to look up their stories now.)

On an ideological level: Based on the numbers, the Hope Scholarship effectively shifts public dollars from a system that benefits the majority of children to a slush fund for well-off families who could already afford private school. Not only that, but it is putting our tax dollars into the hands of religious institutions, which should be considered a violation of separation of church and state.

Educational vouchers in general are a tool to undercut public education. Voucher advocates gripe continuously that public schools are horrible, so they present school choice and educational vouchers as the way to get the best education possible for kids. The educational vouchers then shift money away from public schools to private or for-profit charter schools. Less money makes it harder for public schools to perform satisfactorily, so more families turn to school vouchers. Eventually, the public school system will collapse and private schools will be the only option. And private schools have the ability to pick and choose who can and can’t get an education.

That’s where West Virginia is right now: Republicans are trying to destroy our public education system with the Hope Scholarship — more than two dozen public schools are on track to close or consolidate — so that West Virginians will have no choice but to rely on private or religious schools or resort to homeschooling.

If this warpath against public education continues, it ends with only the wealthy affording education for their kids; children being denied a secular education in favor of one that is framed (if not eclipsed) by religion; and/or a parent — most likely a mother — being forced to sacrifice their career to homeschool their children.

That may be what the far-right wants for our state’s — and our country’s — future, but it’s not what the majority of us want for our state, our country, or ourselves. We cannot stand back and allow a zealous minority to force us down this path.