Kelly Allen is executive director of the West Virginia Center on Budget and Policy.
In a Gazette-Mail story from July 10 about the growing cost of the Hope Scholarship, state Treasurer Larry Pack admitted something that has never been said aloud before.
Pack
“… [H]is office believes only about 10% of the more than 10,000 students who received the Hope Scholarship last year were enrolled in public school before transferring to private school or homeschool settings.”
Soon after, a senior advisor for the Treasurer’s office confirmed on X, “I believe this question was more focused on how many would have done alternative education without Hope which would be still 85-90% of students”.
Put more bluntly, what they both are saying is that nine out of ten students using the Hope Scholarship were never in the public school system and had already chosen private school or homeschool without the Hope Scholarship. That means just one-tenth of its ballooning costs are going to those the program was promised for: families who couldn’t access alternative education options without it.
This may come as news to most people. For years, proponents of the Hope Scholarship have said they support the program to give alternative education options to those would otherwise not be able to access or afford it. One supporter said when the law was passed that it would “open up opportunities to generations of West Virginians who, prior to the law, would not have been able to access an education best suited to their learning needs”.
Lawmakers too intended to keep the program limited, at least for the first few years, to those who would not otherwise have access to private schools or homeschooling. They required that a qualifying student must be enrolled full-time in a West Virginia public school for an entire instructional term in the preceding year or at least 45 days during the current term (the only exception is for rising kindergartners). Despite that, the Hope Scholarship has more than doubled in cost year over year since its implementation, with legislators raising concerns publicly and privately about the Hope Scholarship’s ever increasing slice of a shrinking budget pie.
Treasurer Pack’s admission proves that after three years of the Hope Scholarship, the vast majority of its cost has not helped low-income or rural families take advantage of opportunities they would not have otherwise had as promised but has gone to subsidizing families who were already choosing private school.
Lawmakers would be reckless to allow this program to continue to grow exponentially and without guardrails, while every other state program (including our public education system that serves far more students) is being promised more “belt-tightening” even after years of cuts via flat budgets. While Governor Morrisey used his first State of the State address to call for fully funding the Hope Scholarship and providing pay raises for teachers, school staff, and public sector workers, only one (full funding for the Hope Scholarship) made it into the final budget. Later in the session, a bill intended to increase the number of social workers in public schools had the funding needed to successfully implement it stripped out.
In the 2025-26 school year the Hope Scholarship will cost ten times what the state spends on child care assistance; twice the budget of the Promise Scholarship; and 20 times that of the Communities in Schools program.
It's clear to anyone paying attention that the exploding cost of the Hope Scholarship is undermining our ability to make needed investments in our public schools, and now we also know that it has not expanded choice to new students but is instead largely serving those who already had it.
Changes must be implemented to institute commonsense guardrails and cap the Hope Scholarship’s exponential growth. With costs projected to double or even triple next year, there are a number of ways lawmakers can exercise fiscal responsibility and good stewardship of taxpayer dollars. They can halt the looming expansion of the Hope Scholarship whose only purposes is to further expand the program to families already in private school and set a cap on the overall cost of the program. They can institute income limits and require that schools accepting the Hope Scholarship be accredited and accountable, holding them to the same standards as public schools. And they can refocus those savings and their energy into our public schools, which serve more than 85 percent of the children in our state.
Allen is executive director of the West Virginia Center on Budget and Policy, an independent policy research organization dedicated to advancing policies that improve the economic mobility and quality of life for all West Virginians.
