The majority of students in West Virginia who left public schools in the last three years were chronically absent, prompting concerns among educational officials and lawmakers that students are exiting the schools to avoid truancy penalties.

A bill in the House of Delegates sought to address the issue by pausing homeschool requests from parents of chronically-absent or truancy children. It was to make sure families weren’t avoiding legal ramifications for truancy.

But, as of Tuesday, the measure is dead for this legislative session.

“I (saw) it as a way to help students to make sure that they’re receiving the proper education,” said Del. Christopher Toney, R-Raleigh, who sponsored the legislation.

In the last three school years, 71.6% of students withdrawing to homeschool were chronically absent when they left to homeschool, according to data from the West Virginia Department of Education.

These were students who had 18 or more absences from school when they exited for homeschooling.

State Schools Superintendent Michele Blatt said the education department and Legislature should work together to protect children.

“We have great homeschool parents. It’s just in West Virginia … this data shows us that we have more students that are or more families that are pulling them out for the wrong reasons,” she said.

Toney’s measure, , would have established a 90-day time limit during which a family involved in an active truancy or pre-petition process couldn’t withdraw a student for homeschooling.

“There should be specific safeguards in the code to protect student well-being during truancy proceedings,” the measure said.

County schools superintendents brought the bill idea to House members, Toney said.

“This is the (students) that just repeatedly come back every six months or so,” he said. “These are just the ones that keep bouncing back and forth.”

The bill also cited concerns that families would use homeschooling over the summer as a way to bypass the required reading proficiency requirements in the . The landmark West Virginia education measure in third grade if they haven’t hit certain benchmarks in reading beginning in the 2026-27 school year.

Homeschool parents, advocates opposed measure

While the House’s Public Education subcommittee vetted the bill last week, homeschool lobbyists and advocates railed against the bill.

Thomas J. Schmidt, who represented the Home School Legal Defense Association, argued the state didn’t need “a blanket 90-day barrier that punishes struggling students and ignores the fundamental rights of parents to direct the child’s education.”

“House Bill 5053 claims that parents use homeschooling as an easy out or a shield to avoid accountability,” Schmidt said. “However, the reality is that many of these parents only turn to homeschooling when the parent in the school is unable to protect the child from bullying, or when a child’s illness becomes chronic.”

Del. Kathie Hess Crouse, R-Putnam, one of the House’s most fervent homeschooling supporters, told committee members that the bill was an attack on homeschoolers.

“This bill assumes that the public school can do a better job at protecting their children than the actual parent can,” Hess Crouse said.

A county can deny a homeschooling request through a judge’s order if they feel it is detrimental to the student, she added.

The House’s Public Education Subcommittee didn’t advance the measure to the full House floor for a vote.

Toney said there were some issues with the bill that needed to be addressed, but he’d run out of time since Tuesday was the last meeting of the subcommittee this session.

“We’ll look at it next year and see what language we need to put in there, and how we need to make it more tailored,” he said.

Del. Anitra Hamilton, who serves on the Public Education subcommittee, said she thought it was a good piece of legislation.

“We really have to weigh student safety and student concern, versus inconvenience,” she said. “So it’s going to be one of those things where everybody’s not going to be happy, but we have to weigh what’s more important.”

She cited where West Virginia children who were being homeschooled died due to abuse and/or neglect.

As a member of the minority caucus, Hamilton can’t put a bill on an agenda for consideration.

“When a child has been harmed, then we all should do whatever we can, from a legislation standpoint, to uncover the problem and see what we can do legislative wise to prevent it from happening again,” she said. “It’s unfortunate that when we deal with these things, it becomes inundated with all of these other situational circumstances that really don’t outweigh a child dying.”

As West Virginia educators , Blatt said that the education department has encouraged school employees to focus on chronically-absent children who may be experiencing issues at home preventing them from attending school.

“We’ve tried to kind of change the mindset in the school systems that focus on the kids that we know may have other issues, as opposed to spending your time just doing data collection on a doctor’s note,” she said.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. West Virginia Watch maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Leann Ray for questions: info@westvirginiawatch.com.

When Rachel Marshall was growing up in Virginia, her parents kept a magnet on the refrigerator from a national homeschooling advocacy group, with a phone number to call if local school officials tried to interfere with their decision to educate their children at home.

“You tell [the organization] the state’s after you, and they will come in with their lawyers and defend your right to homeschool and do what you want with your kids,” said Marshall, now a licensed counselor in Utah. “The state should be hands-off, that was their goal.”

Marshall wishes the state had been more hands-on. When she was a child, she said, her education and her safety were at the mercy of her parents, who struggled with mental illness and addiction.

“It was an ugly situation,” Marshall told Stateline. “But I think had there been some sort of regulation, some expectations from the state, I would not have been exposed to that as much.”

As homeschool enrollment has risen in recent years, so have concerns about oversight.

Recent high-profile child abuse deaths in several states have led to renewed calls from lawmakers for stronger regulations. They warn that some abusers claim they are homeschooling their kids when they pull them out of school, but really want to hide their crimes from teachers and other so-called mandatory reporters in public schools. Mandatory reporters are legally obligated to speak up about abuse if they suspect it.

But the push has inflamed a broader debate over parental rights and galvanized hundreds of homeschool groups to rally at statehouses around the country.

In every state, parents or guardians can withdraw their children from public or private school to be homeschooled. States allow this even if the caregiver has been the subject of , according to the Coalition for Responsible Home Education, an advocacy group. Nearly every state allows parents to withdraw children in the middle of an active investigation, and most states don’t prevent  from homeschooling their kids.

Lawmakers in states such as ,  and  have attempted to pass additional reporting requirements to guard against child abuse in homeschool settings.

They’re running up against parents’ rights groups and homeschooling advocates who argue that such regulations treat all homeschooling parents as potential criminals and aren’t necessary because many children in such situations are already on the radar of social service agencies. They say the additional requirements don’t address problems inside child protection agencies that allow such abuse to go unaddressed.

“When bad things happen, people feel compelled to do something, whether it makes a difference or not,” said Connecticut state Rep. Anne Dauphinais, a Republican who opposes homeschool regulation. “It’s often overreach of government, just because [lawmakers] want to feel good about doing something.”

In West Virginia, Democratic state Del. Shawn Fluharty said in an interview that he’d lost track of how many times he’s tried to get a bill passed that would prevent a parent from pulling a child out of public school to homeschool if social services is investigating the parent for possible child abuse or neglect. According to Stateline’s sister publication, West Virginia Watch, this year will mark .

Fluharty calls his bill “Raylee’s Law,” after an 8-year-old girl who died from severe abuse and neglect in 2018. Before her death, her abusers had pulled her out of public school after .

“At this point, I’m just pissed off,” Fluharty told Stateline. “We’ve had at least two other circumstances very similar to Raylee’s situation since I’ve been pushing this legislation.”

Fluharty said he’s considering revising the law’s name to also memorialize Kyneddi Miller, a West Virginia 14-year-old who . Her mother had pulled her from public school in 2021 to homeschool her.

The bill passed the House twice in recent years, with bipartisan support, but died in a Senate committee each time. It faces opposition from homeschooling advocates in the legislature, he said, as well as lobbying efforts from national homeschool groups.

“It’s not a complex situation,” said Fluharty. “It’s a glaring loophole that needs to be closed. The longer it stays open, the more vulnerable children are in West Virginia.”

Homeschool explosion

But interest is . In recent years, the 30 states that publicly report homeschool participation have seen those numbers grow. More than a third of those states recorded their  in the 2024-2025 school year, even exceeding pandemic-era peaks, according to a study published in November.

Homeschooling has increasingly been framed as a political and cultural choice, particularly in conservative circles where it’s promoted as a way to exercise control over children’s education amid anger over how schools address racial equity, gender identity and sexuality, school violence and vaccine requirements. Homeschool supporters praise its flexibility and safety. Others warn that minimal regulation can leave some children isolated from the visibility and protections built into public school systems.

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, homeschool participation hovered around 2-3% of K-12 students. It exploded during the pandemic to a high of 11% of families, as learning outside of traditional schools became normalized. Now  in the United States are homeschooled, according to the most recent data from the U.S. Census Bureau.

The issue doesn’t always fall neatly along party lines. In Georgia,  prompted a  that prohibits caregivers from withdrawing a child from school for the purpose of evading detection of child abuse and neglect. It became law in 2019.

In Hawaii, Republican state Sen. Kurt Fevella filed a resolution in 2024 calling for the state to conduct a wellness visit for any child removed from school to be homeschooled. He was motivated by  in Hawaii who had been taken out of school for homeschooling. It died in committee.

Last year, Rachel Marshall gave testimony before Utah legislators who were considering a controversial bill that would remove part of a 2023 law requiring parents to attest they’ve never been convicted of child abuse before they’re allowed to homeschool their children.

Marshall opposed the bill, worried the state was erasing one more safeguard protecting the small subset of homeschooled children who are at risk of abuse or neglect. But as she sat listening to the homeschooling parents speaking in favor of it, their words sounded familiar.

“I could hear the fear and rage that someone would take away your rights,” she said. “But I think if you are being investigated by [child protective services], you should not be allowed to withdraw your children from daily mandated reporters like schoolteachers.”

The bill’s chief sponsor, Republican state Rep. Nicholeen Peck, said her goal was to remove a portion of state homeschooling law that was ineffective, had created confusion for school districts, and unfairly stigmatized homeschooling families.

The Utah legislature passed the bill and it was signed into law last spring.

Statehouse rallies

Studies are mixed on whether children who are homeschooled are more likely to be victims of abuse.

A  of homeschooled and conventionally schooled adults found homeschooled children aren’t necessarily more likely to report experiencing abuse or neglect.

But among abuse victims, isolation from mandated reporters — like school teachers — is a common thread. A  found that nearly half of child torture victims had been pulled from school to be homeschooled to evade suspicions of abuse. Withdrawal from school to homeschool under suspicious circumstances is  and is associated with higher risk factors for abuse, according to a report from the Coalition for Responsible Home Education.

More than 1 in 5 children withdrawn from school for homeschooling in Connecticut lived in families with at least one substantiated report from the state’s child services agency, according to a report released last year from Connecticut’s Office of the Child Advocate. The office based its findings on a sample of more than 700 children aged 7-11 who were withdrawn from school for homeschooling between July 2021 and June 2024.

For homeschooling families who’ve been providing their children with a high-quality education without oversight, “I can understand why they might feel they don’t need to be regulated,” said Christina Ghio, Connecticut’s child advocate.

“But as a state, we have an obligation to all children,” she told Stateline. “We know there are children whose parents say they’re homeschooling who are not. The challenge is, there’s one set of rules that has to apply to everybody.”

Her office’s report recommended state lawmakers create requirements for annual assessments of homeschoolers.

The report was issued in the wake of a high-profile abuse case: A Connecticut man was rescued in February 2025 after authorities say he’d been  for two decades. His stepmother had pulled him from public school in fourth grade after  with concerns he was being abused.

But when lawmakers gathered for hearings on homeschooling regulation last May, after Ghio’s report, , most of them homeschool families, flooded the state’s Legislative Office Building to protest, according to the CT Mirror.

In Illinois, Democratic lawmakers introduced a sweeping homeschool regulation bill last year that, among other things, would have banned those convicted of sexual abuse crimes from homeschooling. It was  by an  from Capitol News Illinois and ProPublica into the state’s nearly nonexistent homeschool regulation.

But while the bill cleared its committee,  and supporters packed the Illinois State Capitol to oppose it. It never made it to a full vote in the House.

Despite pushback, Connecticut House Speaker Matt Ritter, a Democrat, has signaled his interest in revisiting some kind of oversight during this legislative session.

“I don’t think this is a fight about homeschooling,” he said during  earlier this month, citing cases like the highly publicized death of 11-year-old Jacqueline “Mimi” Torres-Garcia.

In October, the girl’s remains were found on an abandoned property in Connecticut. The family had  with the state’s social services, but her mother emailed school officials in July 2024 to tell them she planned to homeschool her daughter. Authorities say that less than two months later, the girl was dead. An autopsy confirmed her death was caused by .

Dauphinais, the Connecticut Republican, told Stateline she doesn’t believe any of the proposed homeschool requirements she’s heard from her Democratic colleagues would have saved children like Mimi Torres-Garcia.

“If you want to abuse your child, you’re going to abuse your child and you are never going to show up for any kind of annual evaluation,” she said. “They will game the system. We’re not talking about the 99.9% of homeschoolers doing it genuinely. We’re talking about people doing evil things.”

Ritter said families that have been investigated by child protective services or law enforcement need more follow-up. But he was candid about the long road that regulation might face: “That might get really ugly, Republican versus Democrat. I think it depends on how it gets drafted.”

National advocacy

In Utah, some of the speakers supporting removing reporting requirements from state law included representatives from the same organization that was on Marshall’s family’s refrigerator magnet: the Home School Legal Defense Association.

It’s one of the most visible homeschooling organizations in statehouses around the nation, fighting homeschool regulation of all kinds.

The group argues that the intent behind such regulation is good, but misplaced, and that such regulations unfairly burden homeschooling families without meaningfully overhauling the systems — like social services agencies — that are tasked with protecting kids from abuse.

Homeschool families struggle with “being treated as though they were being lumped in with felons, being lumped in with kidnappers, being lumped in with people who had harmed their children,” said Peter Kamakawiwoole, an attorney with the Home School Legal Defense Association, during a Utah House committee  last January.

Also tracking such legislation are groups like the Coalition for Responsible Home Education, which was founded by former homeschoolers and advocates for oversight and accountability in homeschooling. The group drafted  it calls the Make Homeschool Safe Act that proposes certain state reporting requirements for homeschooling families. The Home School Legal Defense Association .

Fluharty, the West Virginia lawmaker, said that when he’s accused of “going after homeschoolers,” he encourages them to read the bill. He believes the national homeschooling lobbyists are lying to families about what his legislation really does.

The goal of such regulation isn’t to take away homeschoolers’ rights, said Marshall. It’s not even necessarily for the kids whose cases wind up in front of child protective services. Instead, she said, it’s for the kids that no one can see.

“These kids are invisible,” she said. “Homeschooling is inherently isolating. Other kids are going to school and have teachers in their lives, a bus driver in their life.”

But for homeschooled kids, “If you are being abused or your education is being neglected, your parents aren’t telling others that. Nobody knows. It feels like the state doesn’t care.”

The U.S. Department of Education launched 18 Title IX Wednesday, a day after the Supreme Court heard two challenges to state bans on transgender girls competing in sports consistent with their gender identity.

The probes are based on complaints to the Office for Civil Rights that accuse colleges and school districts of violating the law because they allow trans students to participate on girls’ sports teams.

“We will leave no stone unturned in these investigations to uphold women’s right to equal access in education programs—a fight that started over half a century ago and is far from finished,” Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Kimberly Richey said in a statement.

The list includes the New York City schools, the Tacoma and Vancouver districts in Washington and the Hawaii State Department of Education. 

The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday appeared to support allowing states to decide whether to ban transgender athletes from competing in girls’ and women’s sports — an issue that has dominated the Trump administration’s education policy for the past year.

In two separate cases, attorneys for track athletes from Idaho and West Virginia argued that such restrictions violate trangender students’ constitutional right to equal protection under the law. They say that through medication, these athletes have reduced any sex-based physical advantages that would create unfair competition. The West Virginia case also questions whether the state’s ban violates Title IX’s right to equal educational opportunities for women and girls.

West Virginia’s law treats Becky-Pepper Jackson, a transgender 10th grader, “differently from other girls on the basis of sex,” Joshua Block, an American Civil Liberties Union attorney, told the court. The Bridgeport High School student, he said, took puberty blockers and went through “female puberty.” It’s “absolutely reasonable,” for states to separate teams based on a biological definition of sex, he said, but argued that the states’ position is “invalid as applied to a discrete subset” of people who have mitigated physical advantages.

But the conservative justices seemed reluctant to carve out an exception for trans students, even those who have taken steps to reduce any competitive advantage.  

“If we adopted that, that would have to apply across the board and not simply to the area of athletics,” Chief Justice John Roberts said.

The court’s decision in the case could impact all with similar laws that prohibit trans girls from competing on teams consistent with their gender identity. 

Upon taking office, President Donald Trump moved aggressively to place restrictions on trans athletes and highlight the experiences of those who said they were either injured by a trans competitor or put at a competitive disadvantage. Through executive order, he said Title IX only applies to cisgender women and girls, while the Department of Justice is now suing and over allowing trans students to compete on teams consistent with their gender identity. LGBTQ advocates want the court to base its decision on the 2020 majority opinion in in which the court found that transgender employees are a protected class in the workplace. 

“This is unfair to me and every transgender kid who just wants the freedom to be themselves,” Pepper-Jackson said in a recorded message last week. “I’ve had my rights and my life debated by politicians who’ve never even met me.”

Education Secretary Linda McMahon, who attended the more than three hours of oral arguments, discussed the stakes for many women outside the court. 

“Americans have had enough of women and girls losing opportunities and being subjected to the indignity and danger of unfair competition due to the left’s warped application of federal law,” she said.

The department pressured the University of Pennsylvania, for example, to no longer allow trans women to compete on women’s teams. As part of a , the university erased trans swimmer and issued apologies to swimmers who lost to her.  

Attorney Kathleen Hartnett, who represents Boise State University student Lindsay Hecox, who takes drugs to suppress testosterone, told the court that some trans students might even be at a disadvantage.  They have “this larger frame with weaker muscles and no testosterone,” she said.

But conservative advocates disagree. 

“Physiologically, males have a larger heart, lungs, more bone mass, more muscle mass and are taller than females,” Beth Parlato, senior legal counsel at the conservative Independent Women’s Law Center, told The 74. “It is undisputed that males retain significant physical advantages over females, making sex-based categories essential to fairness and safety in women’s sports.”

‘Treated as individuals’

Inside the court, Hashim Mooppan, principal deputy solicitor general, argued for the Trump administration, saying that denying a “special accommodation” to a trans woman or girl is not discrimination.

But Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, one of the liberal justices, questioned why Hecox didn’t have a claim. 

“In equal protection law,” she said, “We say all the time things like ‘People need to be treated as individuals and not as just as members of a group.’ ”

Justice Brett Kavanaugh, one of the six conservatives on the court, said he “hates” that trans students might be denied an opportunity to participate in sports. He also questioned whether it’s right to “constitutionalize a rule for the whole country” when the science is still evolving. But making a team or a starting lineup is a “zero-sum game,” he said. “Those things matter to people, big time.”

Observers believe the outcome could rest on how either Roberts or Justice Neal Gorsuch, who wrote the Bostock decision, rule. During Tuesday’s back-and-forth, Gorsuch asked whether transgender status could be considered an “insular class,” considering the history of discrimination against them. But he joined the majority opinion that allowed Tennessee to restrict gender-affirming care for minors. 

‘Not going to be satisfied’

The court heard the arguments in the the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit is set to take up another federal case involving trans athletes. , a nonprofit that opposes trans students participating in women’s sports, sued Minnesota officials over the state’s policy allowing athletes to compete on teams based on their gender identity.

“Their argument is that Title IX demands exclusion of trans athletes from girls’ teams, which is not going to be our position,” said Brian Dittmeier, director of LGBTQI+ Equality at the National Women’s Law Center, which filed a brief in support of Minnesota. 

The decision in the Eighth Circuit case, he said, is likely to come before the Supreme Court rules in the Idaho and West Virginia lawsuits, and could “inform the narrative” in future cases. The Female Athletes United lawsuit, he said, shows that those opposed to allowing trans athletes to compete with women are “not going to be satisfied with a compromise of letting the states decide.” 

Tennessee families experienced a bottleneck earlier this year as they waited to submit applications for the state’s new program. In July, 166 parents that they had received a scholarship, only to alert them a few days later that the notification was a mistake. 

“It wasn’t the most ideal user experience,” said Heide Nesset, a senior fellow for the Beacon Center of Tennessee, a right-leaning think tank. But there was a “tight runway,” about three months, to get the program off the ground. 

With state leaders hoping to serve up to 70,000 students next year, they’re now . Proposals are due Friday.

But the rough start in Tennessee wasn’t an anomaly. All states with education savings accounts have struggled to some extent with ensuring smooth transactions for families, whether that’s paying a school on time or ordering a homeschool curriculum. Some say the solution lies in picking more than one company to handle the increasing demand and improve customer service.

“If it’s one contract, I think the vendor is inherently trying to ensure that the state department has a really fantastic experience,” said Nesset, who is also the vice president of

implementation at the Yes. Every Kid. Foundation, a school choice advocacy organization. “If you have more than one [vendor], then they start competing, and families have the opportunity to make choices.”

Tennessee’s current vendor is Student First Technologies, which won to run a smaller ESA program in three counties. Earlier this year, the state with the Indiana-based company to manage the new statewide program, despite its problems in other states. 

In West Virginia, where Student First still operates the Hope Scholarship program, an ESA, homeschool families complain that they can’t access the platform on their phones and that approvals and denials for purchases are inconsistent. Arkansas canceled its contract with Student First last fall after it failed to deliver a “fully operational” system on time. The company paid the state . 

‘Get what they need’

Eighteen states now have at least one ESA program. With a new federal tax credit scholarship system beginning in 2027, the demand for organizations to manage them will surely grow. The trick is delivering a system that runs smoothly for families while ensuring that they’re using the money the way the state intended. 

In a , Michael Horn, cofounder of the Clayton Christensen Institute, a think tank, talked with Jamie Rosenberg, the founder of ClassWallet. Still the biggest player in the market, the Florida-based company manages nine ESA programs. 

Prior to platforms like his, states had two options, he explained. They either issued debit cards, which made it hard to ensure parents spent the money on allowable purchases, or expected them to pay up front and request reimbursement — a significant obstacle for families on a tight budget.

ESA vendors, he said, give families the “agency to get what they need but also the ease of knowing that what they’re doing and what they’re buying [complies with] program rules.”

Adding more than one vendor to the mix could make the companies work harder to reach lower-income and minority families who are less likely to use the programs, said Lisa Snell, a senior fellow at Stand Together Trust, which funds school choice initiatives.

“Family outreach and satisfaction become the goal rather than the government as the customer to one vendor,” she said.

Texas had the option to choose multiple vendors for its new ESA program, which launches next fall. allows the comptroller’s office to contract with up to five companies. But officials opted against it and awarded a two-year, $26 million contract to New York-based Odyssey, which currently runs programs in four other states. 

Joe Connor, Odyssey’s CEO declined to comment on the state’s decision and referred The 74 to the state comptroller’s office. The office did not respond, but Amar Kumar, CEO of KaiPod Learning, a large national network of microschools, said the state likely felt multiple vendors would further complicate the process.

“There was this huge question of the complexity of doing that,” he said. “How do you tell families which portal to go to or how will they decide who manages which part of the program?”

‘Send a quarterly check’

The vendor platforms include built-in tools to prevent misuse. Student First Technologies has an AI feature, , that reviews each expense, “assigns a confidence score” and flags anything that’s new or that the state hasn’t approved in the past. 

But Katie Switzer, a West Virginia parent using the state’s Hope Scholarship to homeschool her children, said it’s unreliable, sometimes approving purchases for some families and rejecting the same items for others. She thinks states should focus more on monitoring students’ academic progress than tracking every purchase. 

“It’s stupid in my opinion to micromanage down to like the $20 workbook level,” she said. “Honestly, I think it would be more cost effective to send a quarterly check to families.”

That’s unlikely with such programs constantly under the microscope, and critics, especially in Arizona, pointing to high-end purchases, like , as examples of misuse. The state education department says it takes steps to prevent fraud and has to the attorney general’s office that have . 

West Virginia officials said they’re pleased with Student First’s progress since October, when that delayed orders caused students to fall behind on lessons. Orders are now “generally” processed within two business days, said Assistant Treasurer Carrie Hodousek, and the company has added and trained staff to prepare for peak order times.

Providers like Kaipod have their own concerns. School founders in the network have sometimes gone to the brink of eviction from their leased space because of late tuition payments, said CEO Kumar. 

“There should be a predictable schedule, but sometimes it can take weeks extra to get paid,” he said. “If you’re running a small business and you owe rent, you owe payroll and your state payment is delayed, that creates a huge amount of stress for founders.”

For now, rebidding contracts for vendors is the strongest form of accountability, he said.

“They ought to not feel safe once they’ve won a contract,” he said.

Disclosure: Stand Together Trust provides financial support to The 74. 

West Virginia schools continue to lose students, a continuing problem that has contributed to a wave of proposed school closures and consolidations around the state. 

State Schools Superintendent Michele Blatt said schools have lost 2.5% of their students in the past year.

The state’s enrollment is now 234,957 students for this current school year, Blatt shared on Wednesday during a state Board of Education meeting.

“Fifty-three of 55 of our districts did decrease in enrollment this year,” Blatt said, noting only Tyler and Doddridge counties had an increase in student population.

A new West Virginia enrollment showed a 6.5% decline from when the state had 250,899 students in the 2021-22 school year.

School officials have pointed to the state’s ongoing population decline as a major reason for the enrollment drop.

“There’s declining enrollment in our state as a whole and that’s affecting our school systems,” Blatt said.

West Virginia experienced decline in the nation from 2020 to 2024, a time period that included the COVID-19 pandemic.  

Multiple school districts school closures or consolidations this year. Last week, the Roane County Board of Education two elementary and middle schools at the end of the 2025-26 school year. The county plans to consolidate students into other nearby schools. The state Board of Education will have to approve the plan. 

Roane County School Board President Jeff Mace said funding was part of the problem, MetroNews . He said the state’s school funding formula needs to be modernized and should focus more on the needs of students rather than student enrollment.

“I believe if we don’t invest in our education, we’re just going to continue to drive all of our young people and our young talent out of the state and we’re going to prevent people from coming in,” Mace said. 

State school board President Paul Hardesty has already to fix the school funding formula during the next legislative session to prevent more school closures in the rural state. 

According to the state Department of Education, 16 public schools closed in 2024.

Micah Whitlow, director of the West Virginia Department of Education’s Office of School Facilities, said that counties are making these decisions “based on real problems.”

“These things aren’t done on a whim or they just woke up one day thinking about this. Some of them are staff shortages, finances, deteriorating facilities. Some of these it’s all those things together,” he said.

Expired pandemic relief funding and students opting out of public schools to use the state’s broad school voucher program – – have also put a financial strain on public schools. Around 19,000 students are using the voucher program this school year, typically at private religious schools. 

The enrollment report showed that public schools served 477 students using the Hope Scholarship; students using the Hope program can pay to take public school classes. Public schools also served 1,336 Hope Scholarship students that were not funded, according to the report. 

More than 4,000 children are attending virtual schools, which are considered public schools in West Virginia. Most of those students are enrolled in virtual charter schools. The state’s number of charter students has increased since the 2023-24 school year when 2,270 were enrolled.

Overall, most West Virginia students continue to be served in public schools as leaders grapple with financial issues, which can lead to .

“We can say that 98.2% of our students are still served in our public schools,” Blatt said. 

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. West Virginia Watch maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Leann Ray for questions: info@westvirginiawatch.com.

Roane County Schools is facing a projected $2.5 million budget deficit due to overspending, according to the state education department.

District employees have gone over budget on the construction of a and used federal dollars to buy furniture. Some purchases appear to be made without the county board approval, which is required under state code. 

“Was everybody asleep at the wheel in Roane County?” asked Paul Hardesty, a state school board member. “You guys are hemorrhaging cash.”

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Earlier this year, the county received a $402,225 advance on their June allocation of the state aid formula to make payroll.

Roane school leaders this week requested another financial advance of more than $300,000 to cover expenses. 

“You guys are bankrupt. You’re absolutely bankrupt,” board member Gregory Wooten said.

The West Virginia Board of Education declared a state of emergency for Roane County Schools on Wednesday, adding to the growing list of counties now under board control or in a state of emergency.

Declining student enrollment was also cited as a reason that the district should be under a state emergency and develop a plan to correct the problems.

Michelle Stallato is the new county superintendent, just five days on the job. She stood before board members, pledging to fix the problems and do what’s best for children.

“We are going in with eyes wide open. I have an amazing staff that are willing to do the work,” she said. “We understand it’s going to be very unpopular. We understand we’re going to have to make very difficult decisions.”

County didn’t cut positions while student enrollment declined

A report from the West Virginia Department of Education showed that in October 2024, Roane County Schools employed more than 16 teaching and service positions over the funding formula.

“It’s projected we didn’t make enough cuts into this year and that deficit will grow,” Stallato said.

The county overspent $600,000 on special education in the current fiscal year due to improper budgeting, the report said, linking the problem to “inaccuracies in data certified by Roane County Schools.”

The state education department also found that Roane County Schools initially purchased furniture with dollars from multiple federal programs, which were unaccounted for in the budgets for those programs.

Roane County serves a little more than 1,600 students. Like , the county is dealing with a declining student population due to the state’s overall population loss and students opting to use the — the Hope Scholarship — for private schooling or other options.

The district operates on a yearly budget of $27 million. The school system had close to a $2 million budget surplus in 2021; now there’s a projected $2.5 million deficit.

Jeff Mace, president of the Roane County School Board, said they’re pushing for more transparency in budgeting and forecasting.

“We were not completely aware of the magnitude of where we’re at, even as recent as this current budget preparation,” he said. “The board understands … the current position now.”

Last month, the state school board because of multiple issues in the system, including potential conflict of interest and potentially using board of education resources to maintain property.

The board also in Randolph County Schools for six months due to financial concerns, tasking the county with creating a balanced budget. The district is grappling with declining enrollment and aging facilities, which contributed to the financial issues.

On Wednesday, board members selected Hardesty to serve as president, replacing current President Nancy White who said she wasn’t going to seek reelection. Hardesty is a former state lawmaker and Logan County school board member. He has previously served as board president.

“I am humbled by the support and confidence that my fellow board members have placed in me,” Hardesty said. “This board faces many challenges this upcoming year. We will face those challenges head on, with the purposes of doing what is in the best interests of our 241,000 students across the state.”

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. West Virginia Watch maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Leann Ray for questions: info@westvirginiawatch.com.

Two groups filed a lawsuit against West Virginia’s state Department of Health, its Bureau for Public Health and agency leaders on Friday, challenging Gov. Patrick Morrisey’s January executive order, which opened the door for religious and philosophical exemptions to mandatory school vaccination policies. The American Civil Liberties Union’s West Virginia chapter and Mountain State Justice filed the suit in Kanawha County Circuit Court on behalf of two parents with immunocompromised children, according to reporting by

Just over 330 requests for religious and philosophical exemptions to West Virginia’s school vaccine policy have been submitted — and approved — for this school year and 35 have been granted for the coming year, according to records obtained by The 74.

The newly approved religious and philosophical exemptions already outpace the 203 permanent medical exemptions granted in the state over the past decade, at one time the only exemptions allowed in West Virginia.

Before January, when Gov. Patrick Morrisey signed an opening the door for broader exemptions, the state had some of the nation’s strictest childhood vaccination policies. 

The loosening of those policies is occurring amid a deadly measles outbreak that has infected over  across 30 states and despite state legislators rejecting a bill in March which would have codified religious exemptions into state law. The conflict between the governor’s order and the legislature’s action has over how West Virginia officials should proceed and could ultimately lead to legal action between the two branches of government. 

In the meantime, the West Virginia Department of Health is granting religious and philosophical exemptions based on the governor’s order and shared those numbers in response to a Freedom of Information Act request by The 74.

No requests for the newer category of exemptions has been denied, the department said. In contrast, 125 requests for medical exemptions to mandatory school vaccines have been rejected since 2015. Temporary medical exemptions have been granted to 288 West Virginia children in the past decade.

Richard Hughes, a George Washington University law professor and leading vaccine law expert, said the 331 religious and philosophical exemptions sought in just five months represent a “drastic, dramatic increase in the request for exemptions, and that’s going to potentially have public health consequences.”

He added the state appears to be approving them liberally and without real scrutiny.

“Clearly, when you open the door to these types of exemptions, people use them,” he said. “There has been evidence before that when only religious exemption is available, people request them without any really sincerely held belief. This just opens the floodgates.”

While the 331 students who have received exemptions represent a very small percentage of the approximately enrolled in public schools across the state, experts fear the number will continue to rapidly climb, especially at the start of the coming school year.

“You see how fast we approved those? Hundred percent approved … So if we keep allowing an executive order that goes against West Virginia code, it’s going to change the vaccination rate …” said Sissy Price, a registered nurse who serves as co-director of West Virginia Families for Immunization. “And it’s not a matter of if it’s going to happen, it’s a matter of when.”

Experts also emphasized the importance of knowing which regions or schools in West Virginia the exempted students come from to better understand the impact on herd immunity and to allow parents — especially those of immunocompromised students — to make informed decisions about where to send their kids to school.

Despite the governor’s insistence that the state collect that information, an official at the Health Department wrote in an email to The 74, “Nobody in the Department of Health or the Bureau for Public [Health] tracks that.”

“There’s a failure of government there,” said Northe Saunders, executive director of the pro-vaccine . “There’s a failure of making sure that parents can make the best informed decision that they can if we don’t know what immunization rates are like at the school level.”

The governor’s office and the Department of Health did not respond to requests for comment.

So far, West Virginia has no reported measles cases. Two children, both of whom were unvaccinated, have died during the current outbreak, whose case numbers have already surpassed 2024’s total and mark the second-highest number of confirmed cases in a year since the disease was declared eradicated in the U.S. in 2000. Some 96% of reported infections have involved a person who was unvaccinated or whose status was unknown and 13% have resulted in hospitalization. 

In issuing his Jan. 14 executive order, Morrisey relied on an interpretation of the state’s 2023 Equal Protection for Religion Act.

He argued that the law as it stood “forces” some West Virginians “to choose between their religious belief and their children’s fundamental right to public education,” and directed the commissioner of the Bureau for Public Health and the state health officer to establish a process for parents to object. The executive order noted that a “written, signed objection” was sufficient.

Based on the legislature voting down the measure to codify the broader exemption category, state schools Superintendent Michele Blatt issued a memo earlier this month to county superintendents recommending that students not be allowed to attend school next year without required immunizations, regardless of requests for religious exemptions. 

“We are faced with the fact that state law has not been changed by the Legislature and there is no religious exemption provided for in West Virginia law,” Blatt wrote, according to reporting by

But, by the end of the day she rescinded the memo, she had done so “at the Governor’s request.” 

Morrisey then issued May 9 saying that despite the legislative hurdle, the executive order “still stands, and I have no intention of rescinding it.” He further clarified the process to receive an exemption: Each year, parents or guardians must send a signed letter with basic information including their child’s name, date of birth and mailing address. Notably, the letter does not need to include the reason for the requested exemption.

In the wake of this confusion, some school districts have begun seeking about how to respond. 

West Virginia is not an outlier in its quest to allow parents to opt their children out of the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine that is a requirement in all 50 states for children entering child care and schools. 

“It goes towards the general erosion of vaccine policy,” said Saunders. “We’ve seen these kinds of small, incremental changes that are eroding vaccine policy in states across the country. There are still school entry requirements in West Virginia — just like there are in every single state — but this is one other chink in the armor of strong vaccine policy driving strong immunization rates.”

Childhood vaccination since COVID, and there’s fear that decline will accelerate now that Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a well-known vaccine skeptic, is heading the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services. He initially in late February, and on May 14, at his in Congress since his confirmation, he waffled on the importance of vaccines.

When asked if he would vaccinate a child of his own against measles today “Probably for measles. What I would say is my opinions about vaccines are irrelevant.”

He continued, “I don’t want to make it seem like I’m being evasive, but I don’t think people should be taking medical advice from me.”

Last week, the Food and Drug Administration, which falls under HHS, released guidance for COVID vaccines, saying they may require additional studies before approving the shots for healthy Americans younger than 65.

Candice Lefeber, executive director of West Virginia’s chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics, said this move played into one of her fears: “I think the administration is going to make it harder for vaccines to be available.”

“Not only are we not going to require it, but then access to vaccines would be compromised,” she continued. “It’s just really disheartening for science and for our country — and we’re in big trouble.”

The West Virginia House Monday rejected its version of a Senate bill that would have loosened school vaccine requirements and expanded exemptions, voting it down

The bill’s defeat came after the House twice amended the Senate’s version of the legislation, first to remove both the philosophical and religious exemptions approved by the Senate and then to and to allow private and parochial schools to set their own mandatory vaccine requirements.

“The pro-vaccine messaging won out,” Northe Saunders, executive director of the pro-vaccine , told The 74 Monday.

West Virginia now has among the country’s strictest regulations governing the immunizations required for children entering child care and schools, allowing for medical exemptions only. It’s unclear what might come next.

While the House’s vote effectively killed the current legislation, over a dozen other vaccine-related bills have been introduced in the West Virginia legislature and the governor signed an executive order in January establishing the religious and philosophical exemptions that House members rejected.

Saunders said time may be running out for the other vaccine-related bills to move forward during this legislative session.

An amendment that would give West Virginia parents much greater leeway to exempt their children from mandated school vaccinations was deleted from a House bill at the last minute this week, but the prospect of far fewer students in the state getting immunized remains strong.

As written, the would still expand and loosen requirements for medical exemptions for students, making them “the broadest … in the country,” one advocate said. The religious and philosophical exemptions that were struck from the House version of the legislation could also be reintroduced and, while it doesn’t carry the same force of law, Gov. Patrick Morrisey’s January order establishing similarly far-reaching exemptions is also hanging in the balance.

Historically, West Virginia has had some of the nation’s strictest childhood vaccination policies and the current move to soften them is occurring against a deadly measles outbreak that has infected in 15 states and taken the life of one school-age child in Texas. 

“It’s hard to wrap your head around why we would do this right now — or anytime,” said Candice Lefeber, executive director of West Virginia’s chapter of the . “But at such heightened alertness with measles spreading in our country, it should be a wake-up call. And unfortunately, I don’t think that’s happening,”

West Virginia is not an outlier in its quest to allow parents to opt their children out of the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine that is a requirement in all 50 states for children entering child care and schools. 

On Wednesday, Idaho lawmakers passed a that would significantly broaden an existing law banning COVID vaccine mandates to include mandates on any “medical treatment.” If the governor signs it, the bill would apply to public and private schools as well, making Idaho the first state in the country to remove all mandatory school vaccination requirements.

Childhood vaccination since COVID, and there’s fear that decline will accelerate now that Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a well-known vaccine skeptic, is heading the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services. He initially in late February, and in a March 4 seemed to link the ongoing outbreak and child fatality to malnutrition and poor health while pointing to unproven treatments, such as cod oil.

“The best thing Americans can do is to keep themselves healthy,” Kennedy said in the interview. “It is very, very difficult for measles to kill a healthy, well-nourished person.”

Three months in, the number of measles cases has already surpassed 2024’s total and in the 15 states where it’s spread, 95% of infections have involved a person who was unvaccinated or whose status was unknown. Three of those states border West Virginia, although, so far, the Mountain State has no reported cases. 

‘We just want the policy left alone’

The latest House bill still has a more wide-ranging medical exemption that also protects health care providers who grant them “in good faith” from civil liability, except in cases of “gross negligence or willful misconduct.” 

It also includes no enforcement mechanism from a government oversight body nor is there guidance as to what qualifies someone for a medical exemption. 

Northe Saunders, executive director of the pro-vaccine , fears this might lead to bad actors writing “bogus” exemptions. Saunders’ group, which is based in Portland, Maine, opened a West Virginia chapter in February after local advocates asked for their help amid the exemptions push.

“We’re glad that the religious and philosophical exemptions were not part of the bill that came out of committee,” said Saunders, who believes the measles outbreak was a factor in their being cut, “but we expect [attempts to modify the bill] going forward.” 

Saunders said his organization is tracking an additional 20 vaccine-related bills in the West Virginia legislature. And, across 20 states, 47 bills have been introduced which would add or broaden vaccine exemptions.

Parents across the country are able to apply for exemptions if their child is unable to get vaccinated for medical reasons. Most states also have religious exemptions, and 20 have some form of leaving a varied landscape. 

West Virginia is currently one of only five states that don’t allow any exemptions, beyond medical ones. Last school year, they had the for four of the major mandated vaccines, significantly outperforming national averages. Almost all kindergarteners there — 98.3% — had received both doses of the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine. 

The state also had the lowest rate of exemption, with less than 0.1% of kindergarteners being exempt from one or more vaccines. And it was the only state that supported Donald Trump for president in November that did not see an average rise in official exemptions. 

That could change, depending on the fate of the pending legislation and the governor’s executive order.

“The current policy as is, is something that is highly favored among myself and my colleagues,” said Andrea Lauffer, an internal medicine doctor and pediatrician at WVU Medicine – Thomas Memorial Hospital in South Charleston. “We just want the policy left alone.”

Michael Ramey, president of the , noted the role the pandemic has played in the current vaccine skepticism. He said that while his organization does not hold a position on the safety or efficacy of vaccines, it stands in support of bills like the one in West Virginia.

“We welcome a move to give parents greater authority to make the decision that’s best for their individual child,” he said. 

The vast majority of Americans — 88% — believe the benefits of the childhood vaccine for measles, mumps and rubella outweighs the risks, compared with just 10% who say the risks outweigh the benefits, according to a 2023 Seventy percent of Americans say healthy children should have to be vaccinated to attend school, down from 82% in 2019. And the share of parents who think they should be able to decide against vaccination is up 12 percentage points from four years ago, to 28%.

This shift is being driven by Republicans, 57% of whom now support vaccination requirements — down from 79% in 2019.

‘The heat is on’

The debate over vaccine mandates in West Virginia is not new, but “this year, definitely, the heat is on, for sure, at a higher temperature,” said Sissy Price, a registered nurse who serves as co-director of .

Last year, former Gov. Jim Justice vetoed a bill which would have allowed private and parochial schools to set their own vaccination policies. Meanwhile, Morrisey signed his executive order creating religious and philosophical exemptions on his first full day in office.

The governor wrote that current mandatory vaccine laws force West Virginians who have objections “to choose between their religious belief and their children’s fundamental right to public education.” The order, he said, was based on his interpretation of the Equal Protection for Religion Act, signed by Justice in 2023. 

The pending legislation was meant to clarify and codify his order. Even if the bill’s final version does not include religious and philosophical exemptions, the governor’s executive order would still stand, said Richard Hughes, a George Washington University law professor and leading vaccine law expert. 

While the ability to set new laws lies only with the legislature, the governor does have the ability to interpret those laws, which is what his executive order does, Hughes said.

If the executive order is not in line with what the legislature passes, however, it would remain vulnerable to court challenges.

“The governor could be checked by the courts on this interpretation,” he said.

Introduced Feb. 13, would have allowed parents to simply provide a written statement to exempt their child from vaccines for religious or philosophical reasons and applied to public, private and parochial schools.

In addition to loosening the medical exemption process and protecting medical professionals from disciplinary actions, it would also eliminate the position of state immunization officer and no longer require schools to report a violation if an unvaccinated child without an exemption attempted to enroll.  

At a Feb. 21 committee meeting, both Democratic and Republican senators spoke out in opposition to the bill. Many cited the measles outbreak that began in West Texas in late January as core to their concerns.

GOP Sen. Mike Oliverio read aloud from a letter written by one of his constituents, a retired physician.

“Loosening these requirements will eventually lead to outbreaks of these diseases, including in our children, as the number of vaccinated individuals fall,” he read. “I urge you to vote against this bill for the sake of West Virginia’s children.”

A number of Republican lawmakers also spoke in favor of the bill, which ultimately passed by a 20-12 vote, with two senators absent, before going to the House. 

The House bill that came out of committee this week is now expected to move to the floor, where it will be debated and potentially amended again. If the final House bill that passes still differs from the initial Senate bill, senators will need to either accept the House’s version or head to a conference committee to reconcile the two before sending it on for Morrisey’s signature. 

The phrase “say the hard part out loud” has had a moment in the national spotlight recently. And within West Virginia, you’ll hear it repeatedly when you talk to education professionals in the Eastern Panhandle about teacher pay.

Something else you’ll hear with regularity is the word “crisis.”

Michelle Barnhart, a social studies teacher at Martinsburg’s South Middle School in Berkeley County, has seen the teacher shortage turn from a growing problem into something much more serious.

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“When I started teaching in 2017, you had to be actively working on your degree to even be considered for a position. Now, they’re putting people with associate degrees — or no degree at all — into classrooms as full-time teachers,” she said. “They aren’t supposed to, but they have no choice.”

The state, added Barnhart, is ignoring the problem.

“Charleston doesn’t see it, or chooses not to. People downstate don’t understand that many of the adults in these kids’ classrooms up here aren’t actually teachers — because the teachers have gone elsewhere for better pay.”

Imagine, she said, if hospitals started hiring people with no medical background to be doctors. “Just pulling people off the street, handing them a clipboard, and saying, ‘Here, practice medicine.’ That’s what’s happening here in education.”

Barnhart said that many of her colleagues and fellow educators feel powerless at the end of the day.

“The cost of living in the panhandle is nowhere near the rest of West Virginia, but teachers, state workers — anyone whose salary is coded into law — get the same base pay. If you live elsewhere, that’s not a big deal. But if you move here, you suddenly realize this is a crisis.”

Parents, she said, are often unaware of just how bad the situation has become.

“They’ll see the bus driver shortage on the news and get outraged about routes being cut. But they don’t know what’s happening inside the classrooms. They don’t see how many positions go unfilled all year, or how often classes are just split up when a teacher calls out — overcrowding the ones that are already at their limit.”

Even for those who stay, Barnhart said, burnout is inevitable.

“You have algebra teachers covering trigonometry. English teachers covering history. Some days, they still can’t find someone to cover,” she said. “When that happens, learning just stops.”

Andrew Fincham, a health and physical education teacher at Martinsburg High School in Berkeley County, has seen the pattern repeat itself year after year.

“It’s only getting worse,” he said. “And with the population growth in the panhandle, we’re running out of room. Classrooms are overflowing, and we’re sticking kids in trailers to make it work — but the turnover rate with teachers is staggering.”

Currently, Berkeley County’s student population alone —  — exceeds the of 26 entire counties in West Virginia. As of the start of the current school year in August 2024, Berkeley County had permanent substitutes hired.

“We’re losing an alarming number of teachers every year throughout the county — whether it’s retirement or leaving for more money,” Fincham said. “And the impact on students is undeniable — all schools, all grade levels.”

Fincham doesn’t see the “revolving door” getting any better without major policy changes.

“All the nearby states — Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania — adjust salaries based on cost of living. West Virginia doesn’t. It’s easy to see where this is headed. If the state doesn’t start thinking about this in a new way, in five years, it’ll be catastrophic.”

The impact on retention, added Barnhart, can’t be overstated.

“Berkeley and Jefferson counties, especially, have become steppingstones. Teachers come here, get a few years of experience, and then leave for better pay — often nearby.”

For Barnhart, the predicament is both personal and professional. “I have kids in this school system; I see it as a parent and as an educator,” she said. “It’s frustrating because I don’t want to leave, but at some point, I might not have a choice.”

Considering almost all those choices are within 30 minutes or less, Barnhart admitted it’s hard to ignore the disparity.

“If I left for Frederick County Schools [Virginia], I’d make over $6,400 more per year,” she said. “In Washington County [Maryland], over $11,500 more. And Loudoun County [Northern Virginia], almost $25,000 more.”

The numbers don’t lie

At the end of the day, however, this isn’t a new conversation for people like Barnhart, Fincham, and thousands of others within the region. In recent decades, West Virginia’s education landscape has been punctuated by significant teacher strikes, notably in and 2018 — both primarily driven by concerns over inadequate compensation and escalating health care costs.

The , in particular, saw approximately 20,000 educators and school personnel shutting down schools across all 55 counties, culminating in a 5% pay raise for all state workers.

And yet, in 2025 — as in most years previous — West Virginia sits either nationally or perilously close to dead last on just about any average teacher salary list you come across — jostling for position between Florida, South Dakota and Missouri year after year. Be that as it may, according to the most recent data available from the National Education Association, the estimated national average annual salary for teachers — while West Virginia shuffles in at .

That said, the Eastern Panhandle’s three core counties — Berkeley, Jefferson and Morgan — are the fastest-growing in the state, and closest to the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area, making them highly susceptible to issues like cost-of-living disparities and teacher-pay inequities.

According to the most recent data from the West Virginia Department of Education, the in Berkeley County lands at $55,412; the average for Jefferson County comes in at $54,153; and Morgan County sits at $55,624.

Compare that to West Virginia’s poorest county, McDowell, where the average teacher salary is . However, the average home value in McDowell County hovers with the median home sale price standing at approximately $41,000. Accordingly, almost all cost-of-living data is lower or significantly lower in . To that end, $53,296 goes a long way there, as it does in numerous other counties in West Virginia that boast similar cost-of-living data.

By contrast, average home values in Berkeley County climb into the . In Jefferson County, it’s even higher, with values . In Morgan County, values can . The cost of living within these three counties is commensurate with those values. But the average teacher salary within the Eastern Panhandle comes in at $55,063 — not even $2,000 more annually than West Virginia’s poorest county.

Talk to anyone close to this issue, and they will tell you in no uncertain terms — it’s becoming all but impossible to work as a teacher or education service worker in the Eastern Panhandle and pay the bills. And when extra money does arrive, it’s in the form of a statewide raise — without consideration for locality pay — which keeps that allotment relatively small in proportion to the ever-widening economic gap between the Eastern Panhandle and the rest of the state.

Bargaining power

“It’s economics 101,” said John Deskins, director of West Virginia University’s Bureau of Business and Economic Research. “If salaries remain the same across the state, schools in more competitive job markets like the Eastern Panhandle will struggle to attract and retain teachers. It’s a matter of supply and demand — higher costs and a stronger labor market require higher pay.”

Berkeley County Schools Superintendent Ryan Saxe, formerly superintendent in Cabell County, echoed the sentiment — and admitted to not fully grasping the depth of the problem until taking his current job.

“In my previous county, we competed with Ohio and Kentucky for teachers, but the disparity wasn’t nearly as severe as what we see here with Maryland and Virginia,” he said.

Saxe doesn’t believe West Virginia needs to match those salaries dollar for dollar, “… but we must close the gap,” he said. “Right now, we have around 200 permanent substitute positions because we can’t fill them with certified staff. That depletes our substitute pool and leaves us constantly reposting vacancies for high-need areas.”

Sen. Patricia Rucker, R-Jefferson, believes part of the issue is Charleston’s reluctance to even acknowledge cost-of-living disparities.

“The federal government has already done the research to determine appropriate salary increases for employees based on regional economic conditions,” she said. “A similar approach for public employees in high-cost areas in our state makes sense.”

But the push for locality pay has failed repeatedly, she said, primarily due to opposition from lawmakers outside the Eastern Panhandle.

“The Senate has passed similar measures three times, only for them to fail in the House,” Rucker said, “The last time, we were 14 votes short. That’s a big gap.”

The resistance comes from a long-standing belief in uniform pay across all 55 counties, said Dale Lee, president of the West Virginia Education Association.

“But that resistance mindset ignores an economic reality,” Lee said. “A few years ago, an attempt to secure locality pay for state police was soundly defeated. The challenge is that while it would benefit a few counties, the majority wouldn’t see any advantage — so their delegates aren’t inclined to support it.”

Instead of direct locality pay, some legislators are exploring alternatives, like reducing the “local share,” which would allow high-growth counties to keep more of their tax revenue to fund education salaries.

“If that money is earmarked for salaries and benefits, it could be a real solution,” Lee said.

As Lee indicated, the shortage isn’t limited to teachers — state police, social workers and other public employees face the same problem in high-cost areas.

Former West Virginia delegate John Doyle has been advocating for locality pay for over 30 years, first proposing a housing allowance in the early 2000s as a way to soften opposition.

“The state would provide a housing allowance based on cost-of-living data,” he said. “Every county would be ranked from 1 to 55, with the median county serving as the baseline. Any county ranked above the median would receive some level of housing allowance — smaller for those just above, larger for the highest-cost counties.”

He recalled that when cost-of-living data was first released to legislators, some were stunned by the housing prices in the Eastern Panhandle. “They assumed we all lived in large homes. I had to explain that I lived in a 1,000-square-foot FHA rancher, and it was worth almost double the state average.”

Doyle also warned against the idea that raising salaries in border counties would simply cause a ripple effect of teacher migration.

“Salaries don’t need to match Maryland and Virginia — just get close enough. If the gap is $20,000, they’ll leave. If it’s $10,000 or less, they might stay.”

But the state has spent decades failing to act. Doyle pointed out that in 1990, West Virginia was ranked 26th in teacher pay after a major statewide raise under former Gov. Gaston Caperton. By the late 1990s, Maryland and Virginia had surged past it once again.

“Every few years, the issue reaches a boiling point, like the 2018 teacher strike, which resulted in a 5% statewide raise — but failed to address the Eastern Panhandle’s unique economic challenges,” he underscored.

With legislative momentum reliably sluggish, greater political action might be required, said Rucker — who also chairs the Government Organization Committee.

“If we don’t have enough qualified teachers, we are failing to meet our constitutional obligation to provide an efficient education system. A class action lawsuit could force the state’s hand,” she said.

On the economic side, Deskins sees another consequence of inaction: economic decline.

“If schools decline due to this crisis, the region becomes far less appealing. People don’t want to move to areas with struggling schools, which would ultimately slow economic growth,” Deskins said.

Essentially, explained Deskins, West Virginia’s fastest-growing region — the only part of the state successfully attracting new residents — is being left to fend for itself.

“From a broad economic-development perspective, we’re making one of the state’s most promising regions less attractive — ultimately working against ourselves,” Deskins said.

The political fight will only continue, and will hopefully play a prominent role in the current legislative session, said Doyle — who believes the Eastern Panhandle finally has strength in numbers.

“The Eastern Panhandle now has more than 10% of the legislature,” Doyle said. “That gives our delegation real bargaining power. If they unify and make this a non-negotiable priority, they can trade support on other bills to get it passed.”

Rucker agreed.

“The delegates from this region have better strength in numbers, and are working hard to educate their colleagues and emphasize that this benefits the entire state, not just the Panhandle,” she said.

Nonetheless, Lee remains skeptical.

“In my experience, when the legislature makes something a priority, they find the money for it,” he said. “If this becomes a priority, a solution will follow. But that remains to be seen.”

Doyle, however, was more blunt: “At the heart of it all is the fact that the state doesn’t want to give money to teachers because they want to be able to give a giant tax break to corporations.”

Repeated requests for comment from State Superintendent of Schools Michele Blatt went unanswered.

The cost of inaction

Imagine a moment in the near future in the Eastern Panhandle — likely Berkeley or Jefferson Counties — when a brand-new high school opens with all the pomp and circumstance that comes with such occasions. And on day one, as the doors open and the students pour through them en route to homeroom and the new year ahead, not a single certified teacher is there to greet them. Rather, every room, and every subject, is being covered by a substitute.

Sounds crazy? Many education professionals in the Eastern Panhandle are calling it something else: inevitable.

“I can easily see that happening — we’re drowning,” said Jana Woofter, a chemistry and physical science teacher at Spring Mills High School in Martinsburg. Woofter also serves as president of the Berkeley County Education Association.

“Bills are often triple what they are in other parts of the state,” she said. “Housing costs are through the roof. Berkeley County tries to help with a housing allowance, but Jefferson and Morgan counties don’t have those same benefits. Even with the assistance, my members are struggling — especially with PEIA [West Virginia’s Public Employees Insurance Agency] .”

The struggle isn’t just with the state. Clay Anders, a physical education teacher at C.W. Shipley Elementary in Jefferson County’s Harpers Ferry, is frustrated that even as property values have doubled, teachers haven’t seen a county-based raise in over a decade.

“The local levy passed again, and there’s millions in additional revenue coming in — but none of it has gone to us in quite a while,” he said. “Meanwhile, the board office has added new positions and given themselves raises every year.”

As of Nov. 6, 2024, the passed with ease — totaling $25,427,656. According to Jefferson County Schools, the bulk of the levy — $19,376,035 — will go to “salary assistance for teachers and service personnel.”

At the same time, Anders pointed out, extra-pay options that once existed for Jefferson County educators have disappeared.

“The county cut a program that allowed teachers to earn up to 3,000 extra dollars per year. That was real money that made a difference. But then they phased it down to $1,500, and now it’s gone completely.”

The level of participation in that program told him everything he needed to know.

“Nearly 98% of eligible teachers took part in it,” Anders said. “That should tell you how much we need the money.”

He believes that if the county won’t act, teachers may have to take matters into their own hands.

“Maryland and Virginia have county-based unions that fight for local pay,” Anders said. “West Virginia doesn’t. We only have state-level unions, and they aren’t fighting county battles.”

Additionally, Anders and a group of teachers are preparing a Freedom of Information Act request to uncover exactly where the money is going.

“The board claims there’s no money for teacher raises, yet they’re increasing salaries at the top. If every million dollars in new revenue could mean an $800 to $900 raise per teacher, then where is that money going?”

The answer, at least in Berkeley County, according to Board of Education member Damon Wright, is complicated.

“Most of our budget already goes to salaries,” Wright said. “And we’ve denied requests for new administrative positions to keep costs down. But we continue to have growth needs — especially when it comes to mental health services for students, which require more funding.

“That said, every time we dip into reserves, we run the risk of the state stepping in and questioning our financial management. We’ve increased the housing allowance, and we’ll keep looking for ways to supplement pay, but we can’t solve this alone.”

The challenges only get more complex, he said, when Charleston refuses to act.

“The state doesn’t believe in cost-of-living adjustments. They think if we raise salaries in high-cost areas like the panhandle, teachers from rural counties will flood the region. But that’s not realistic. Most teachers in McDowell and similar counties are among the highest-paid professionals in their communities. Here, teachers need roommates just to afford rent.”

Michelle Pereschuk, a special education teacher at South Middle School, called the system broken and confessed that teachers are running out of reasons to stay — including herself.

“I’ve been at the tipping point for years,” she said. “I was born and raised in Berkeley County. My kids are in the school system. I want to stay — but I can’t afford it much longer.”

Like many in the county, Pereschuk’s mortgage swallows her paycheck. She once considered a position in nearby Washington County, Maryland, that would have paid her $11,000 more in the first year and up to $17,000 more over time. She ultimately stayed due to personal reasons, but the pull to leave grows stronger every day.

“Winchester City Schools and Frederick County, [both in Virginia], are 20 minutes from my house. Maryland and Virginia also allow out-of-state teachers to send their kids to school there. For the first three years, you pay a small tuition fee, then your kids attend for free. If I move, I could take my youngest with me and give him a better-funded education while making a lot more money.”

Such decisions aren’t just being measured in Pereschuk’s household, she assured, but rather, in many homes across the region.

“Off the top of my head, I can name at least 10 people in my school alone who are seriously considering leaving,” she said.

Woofter, who works multiple jobs to make ends meet, added that, even for those who choose to stay, survival requires sacrifices.

“I run the science fair for my school and the county, coordinate academic competitions, tutor, sell tickets at events — anything to make extra money. If I moved across the border, I wouldn’t have to do all that. But I stay because I love it here.”

As for rising insurance costs, Wright said, whatever raises the state offers at this point are quickly wiped out by PEIA increases.

“The misconception is that a raise actually means more money,” he said. “It doesn’t. When insurance premiums jump 40%, and co-pays triple, as they’re set to do, it’s actually a pay cut. Later this summer, when those PEIA increases hit, I think we’ll see a mass exodus — not just teachers, but public employees across the board.”

Without action, warned Woofter, the situation will only deteriorate. She’s already seeing it play out at her own school.

“Spring Mills High School opened in 2013. In just over a decade, fewer than 20 original staff members remain. That kind of turnover is devastating.”

Moreover, Wright said, Charleston’s inaction is feeding into another, larger movement — the privatization of education.

“Rather than addressing the crisis in public schools, the state is using the decline as an excuse to push private schools, charter schools and voucher programs,” he said. “The problem is, 25% of Berkeley County’s students have special needs, and public schools are required to serve them — private schools are not.”

West Virginia doesn’t fully fund those services so counties cover the gap.

“If lawmakers shift funding away from public schools to private options, that burden grows,” Wright said. “They’re letting the system fail so they can justify alternatives.”

At the end of the day, he said the community is the last line of defense.

“We’re already in crisis mode — whether the state chooses to address it or not. The public needs to understand just how bad this is getting. And the only way any of this changes is if the public demands it — loudly. If people in the panhandle make enough noise, Charleston can’t ignore it forever.”

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. West Virginia Watch maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Leann Ray for questions: info@westvirginiawatch.com.

However, educators and lawmakers should consider options for advancing school choice far more broadly. One potential opportunity: strengthen and expand , which allows students to attend public schools outside their residential zones as long as space is available. 

The latest from EdChoice showed that 79% of Democrats, 75% of Republicans and 73% of independents with school-aged children support open enrollment. 

There are two types of public-school open enrollment: within-district, which lets students transfer to schools inside their assigned district, and cross-district, which lets students enroll outside district boundaries. The of a strong open enrollment law is that all districts must participate so long as schools have open seats available.

Like other school choice policies, open enrollment has gained momentum since the pandemic. Reason Foundation research finds that “ have either a robust cross- or within-district open enrollment policy, while do not, leaving with limited school options.” 

Since 2021, nine states have codified strong open enrollment laws, including , and . But before this recent surge, it wasn’t just red states: six were red or leaned red, three leaned blue and three were purple states. Blue-leaning and purple states, including Delaware and Colorado, have very successful open enrollment laws; others, like California and Washington, have elements of successful public school transfer programs.

In Delaware, whose program ranked seventh in , about used open enrollment during the 2020-21 school year to find an alternative that was the right fit for them. 

Kansas codified its strong open enrollment laws in 2022 with a Democratic governor. Preliminary reports show that more than used the state’s cross-district open enrollment program just launched in 2024. 

Colorado passed its open enrollment law back in 1990. During the 2023-24 school year, nearly 200,000 Colorado students, 28% of the traditional public school population, used open enrollment to find the best public school for them. This is especially notable because this past November, Colorado voters rejected a statewide to establish a right to private school choice. Colorado illustrates how strong open enrollment laws can enjoy success in states where other forms of school choice may struggle to gain traction.

With 2025 legislative sessions starting, lawmakers and school choice advocates should consider public school open enrollment proposals that expand options for families. With its widespread popularity among parents and its success across , purple and states, open enrollment is a winning political issue for the right and left that can benefit the tens of millions of students in public schools.

Last September, the CEO of a company handling online payments for West Virginia’s private school choice program promised not to seek additional business until he fixed technical glitches that led to a huge backlog of orders.

“Student First Technologies has assured us that they will not pursue contracts with additional states until the issues and challenges we’re experiencing here in West Virginia are resolved. That’s a commitment,” said former Treasurer Riley Moore. His comments came during a board meeting devoted to the state’s Hope Scholarship, an education savings account program that pays for private school tuition and homeschooling.

Well into the current school year, over 3,000 orders were unfulfilled, forcing parents to pay out of pocket for books, tech equipment and services that the state promised to provide. Some families couldn’t even download Theodore, the company’s payment platform. 

Four months later, some parents using the Hope Scholarship say not much has changed. They still complain of poor customer service and purchases that are approved for some families, but not others.

“From a parent perspective, performance has not improved significantly,” said Katie Switzer, a mother of five who shared concerns with the state last summer. 

In January, others posted complaints on Google’s webstore, where parents can access the payment platform. “Please go back to last year’s system. I still cannot access … TheoPay,” one parent wrote. Another said, “I’ve scanned the cart at least 100 times and the same sentence pops up every time, ‘Something unexpected happened, please resubmit your cart.’ ”

Despite its promise to West Virginia, The 74 has learned that the Indiana-based company has been pushing to expand. In late fall, Student First submitted an unsuccessful proposal to handle expenditures for .

Now the company could be in the running to manage a statewide ESA program in Tennessee, a prize that would mark a turnaround for a newer player in what has become a . Student First already manages for about 2,000 students in the Memphis, Nashville and Chattanooga areas. passed last month would take the program statewide, where it would serve roughly 20,000 students. 

The potential for growth, however, raises questions over whether Student First, which lost a $15 million contract to run Arkansas’ ESA program because it failed to deliver on its promises, can meet the demand. 

‘Evolving very quickly’

The Tennessee governor’s office won’t say for sure whether it plans to hold a competitive bidding process. Elizabeth Lane Johnson, the governor’s press secretary, told The 74 Tuesday that the state Board of Education will first have to write rules for the expanded program. 

She added that officials have “met with a number of experienced vendors to learn how other states have implemented universal school choice programs successfully.” 

Last November, Lee met with , a leader in the industry, at a conference in Oklahoma City, The Tennessean reported. But Mark Duran, Student First’s CEO, said the situation in Tennessee is “still unfolding” and that he hopes to continue serving the state. 

Some observers say it would be unusual for the education department not to open the process up to other bids.

“The technology is evolving very quickly,” said Jim Blew, a former U.S. Department of Education official and ESA advocate who later advised ClassWallet. “I would be really surprised if they don’t open it up to a new competition. They’re scaling up; they’re going universal.”

If get their way, red states won’t be the only ones with universal voucher programs. They’ve reintroduced a bill in Congress to create a nationwide tax credit scholarship program. And while details have yet to emerge, President Donald Trump directed the Department of Education to use grant funds to prioritize private school choice.

“We have millions of students right now who live under some sort of school choice program,” KellyAnne Conway, a counselor to the president in his first term, said . “We know it’s effective.” 

The West Virginia treasurer’s office did not answer questions about whether Student First has caught up with its backlog of orders. But Duran told The 74 “a lot has changed” since last fall. 

That’s when Arkansas fined Student First over $500,000 because of delays in delivering a “fully operational” platform. In an canceling the contract, Education Secretary Jacob Oliva told Duran that processing delays meant that students, families and vendors were receiving “service below the standard to which they were entitled.” At the same time, homeschooling parents in West Virginia couldn’t order curriculum, equipment and school supplies for their kids because of problems with the company’s payment system. 

A hold-up in funding can be a major setback for small businesses trying to establish themselves in the market. 

When Student First still operated in Arkansas, Lauren McDaniel-Carter waited seven weeks after the school year started before her microschool ACRES received payments totaling about $23,000. All but three of the 26 students she serves at her home in northeast Arkansas participated in the state’s Education Freedom Account program. She had to take out a $50,000 loan to run the school and pay her small staff. 

‘Larger and more numerous’

The state replaced Student First with , which held the contract during the program’s first year.

Duran, Student First’s CEO, did not respond to specific questions about the status of orders in West Virginia, but said his team seeks to “constantly improve our operations.” 

“Momentum remains strong,” he said. “We’ve grown and are ready for even more growth.” 

The company now has over 35 staff members and recently hired Andrew Nelms, formerly with school choice advocacy group Yes. Every Kid, as its new head of government affairs. Other include a vice president of operations, a software engineer and a “customer success” director. 

The additional personnel, Duran said, will allow the company to “support larger and more numerous programs across the country.” 

An entrepreneur, Duran grew up in northern Michigan where his mother taught him while building a large network of homeschooling families. The flexibility, he said, allowed him to spend time with his dad, a homebuilder, and sparked his business career.

He got his start in the private school choice sector in Indiana when he teamed up with a friend who built a software platform for managing donations to tax credit scholarship programs. 

Indiana “education freedom policy folks” encouraged them to break into the ESA market, he said. He was further inspired after attending a 2020 ExcelinEd conference in Florida, where he mingled with voucher advocates who saw the pandemic’s disruption as an opportunity to expand private school choice. 

“We saw a bigger picture,” he said. Among lawmakers there was a “big push to unlock more money … to send to families through these different programs.” 

CHARLESTON, W.Va. (WV News) — West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey, co-leader of a six-state coalition, declared victory Thursday in challenging the federal Department of Education’s overhaul of Title IX of the Educational Amendments Act, which he argued would harm West Virginia students, families and schools.

The U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Kentucky granted summary judgment in favor of the coalition — the court denied the Education Department’s cross-motion for summary judgment.

“This is a victory not only for the rule of law, but also for common sense and the safety of every student,” Morrisey said. “The Biden administration’s Title IX revisions would have ended sex-based protections for biological women in all aspects of education, and this would have marked a retreat from the progress women have made.”

If DOE’s unauthorized rewrite of Title IX would have been allowed to stand, West Virginia schools could have been compelled to allow males self-identifying as female — in every grade from preschool through college — to use girls’ and women’s bathrooms and locker rooms, play on girls’ and women’s sports teams, and access other female-only activities and spaces or risk losing billions in federal funding.

Indiana, Ohio and Virginia joined the West Virginia-, Kentucky-, and Tennessee-led lawsuit. The coalition filed the lawsuit in April 2024.

For 50 years, Title IX has helped equalize women’s access to educational facilities and programs by barring discrimination based on sex by federally funded schools, Morrisey said. At the same time, because of the enduring physical differences between men and women, Title IX has always allowed the sex-segregated spaces — like bathrooms and locker rooms — that are ubiquitous across the nation, Morrisey said.

This story was orginally published by WVNews

The state school board on Wednesday approved another round of school closures in West Virginia after county superintendents repeated a similar problem: student enrollment is rapidly declining and causing financial distress.

Seven schools throughout Clay, Preston, Wetzel and Wood County will close in the next few years. Impacted students will be moved into already-existing schools.

“Most towns die after a closure of a high school,” said Charles Goff, mayor of the town of Hundred in Wetzel County. He spoke to board members in Charleston ahead of the vote. “[Towns] lose incorporated status, lose elected officials in town, and it leads to fire departments closing and town charters being revoked. That includes losing EMS. We are an hour away from the hospital, and fire and EMS are crucial in our community.”

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There has been a wave of proposed school closures this year as counties are faced with budget holes spurred by student population loss. West Virginia’s overall population is declining. Roughy 4,000 students left public schools this year; some of those students left to attend private and charter schools or to be homeschooled.

Under the current school funding formula, counties receive state funding based on the number of students.

Fifty-three schools have closed in the previous five years, and counties this year have proposed or been approved to close 25 schools. In November, the state school board as the district has lost thousands of students over the last few years.

“It’s a difficult time and the problems that … counties are facing are financial and it’s bringing us to this day,” said Debra Sullivan, a state school board member. “We need to focus on strengthening our public school system.”

More than 10,000 students statewide opted this year to use , the state’s broad education savings account program that gives roughly $4,400 per student in taxpayer money to families to use for private school, homeschooling and more.

Wood County has more than 300 students using the Hope Scholarship this year, which meant the district didn’t get $1 million in state funding because those children were no longer counted in the enrollment-based formula. In Clay County, dozens of students are using the scholarship, equating to $157,000 in state funding no longer available to the county.

Several members of the West Virginia Board of Education have called the GOP-heavy Legislature . Governor-elect Patrick Morrisey, a Republican, said he in the state, where the vast majority of students in the poor state attend public schools.

“The state needs to revise the funding formula for these schools. It hasn’t been done for years and years,” said state school board Vice President Victor Gabriel. “We just don’t have the people and money, and it’s getting worse. Every time we lose students we lose dollars.”

Counties are required to keep balanced budgets.

“We’re a poor county, so we have to live within the state aid formula. We reduced our personnel by about 10% last year, 26 [people]. That includes positions that were paid for by COVID dollars,” Clay County Superintendent Philip Dobbins told board members.

The board voted to close Clay County Middle School, the county’s only middle school, due to declining student population and the age of the building. Sixth grade students will attend the elementary schools; seventh and eighth grade students will attend Clay High School. It will take effect at the end of the 2026-27 school year.

The county has less than 8,000 people, down from 10,000 a few years ago, and there has been a 31% decline in students since 2016. More

“That’s several million dollars we’re down. That’s significant,” Dobbins said.

Superintendents say school closures necessary for finances

Like Dobbins, superintendents from Preston, Wetzel and Wood said funding woes were the driving reason for the closures. Some of the schools that will close need millions of dollars in repairs that don’t make sense for older buildings.

Wetzel County Superintendent Cassie Porter said the closures of Hundred High School and Paden City High School were necessary as the county’s population continued to decline. The district has lost 800 students.

She said her district couldn’t offer the rigorous courses needed at all the high schools in its current situation.

“Our test scores rank very, very low. We need to pull our resources together, in our opinion,” Porter said.

Several parents, students and community members attended the meeting to voice opposition to the closures.

Austin Hayes, a freshman at Hundred High School, said his small school had offered him a chance to participate in many different learning activities. He asked the board to reconsider closing his school.

“Just this year, I was part of the culineering team that got first in the state. In a larger school, these opportunities would be much harder to come by with more students vying for limited spots,” he said. “At Hundred, every student gets a chance to shine.

The board voted to consolidate Hundred High School into Valley High School. Paden City High School, which already faced a possible temporary closure , will be consolidated into Magnolia High School.

In Preston County, schools Superintendent Brad Martin said Fellowsville Elementary School in Tunnelton has seen a 50.8% decrease in student enrollment over the last 10 years. There are 59 students enrolled in the school this year. The school needs $2 million dollars in repairs; Martin said that closing it would save around $684,000.

County-wide enrollment is down with a decline in local coal mining jobs, Martin said, spurring a drop in state funding for schools. County residents opted not to approve two different excess levies that could have provided extra money.

“Based on this year, the district will be required to eliminate 12 professional positions and 16 service positions. We made substantial cuts in positions last year,” Martin said.

Fellowsville will be consolidated into South Preston School at the end of this school year.

The board also approved consolidating Rowlesburg School, an elementary school also in Preston County, into Aurora School at the end of this school year due to a drop in students and the price tag of building maintenance.

Fairplains Elementary School in Wood County will be closed and merged into Martin Elementary School at the end of the 2024-2025 school year.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. West Virginia Watch maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Leann Ray for questions: info@westvirginiawatch.com.

They appeared to favor leaving such consequential matters up to lawmakers, but also wrestled with the possible implications of doing so.

“There are risks both ways in allowing the treatment or not allowing the treatment,” Justice Brett Kavanaugh said after hearing arguments over a Tennessee law that prohibits gender-affirming medication or surgery for trans minors. “There’s no kind of perfect way out … where everyone benefits and no one is harmed.”

In her comments, U.S. Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar argued that the ban discriminates on the basis of sex and violates the 14th Amendment guarantee of equal protection. 

“There is a consensus that these treatments can be medically necessary for some adolescents,” she said, noting that they can reduce suicide attempts. The Tennessee legislature, she added, has “completely decided to override the views of the parents, the patients, the doctors who are grappling with these decisions.” 

Justice Samuel Alito asked if she wanted to change her view that there’s a strong research basis for the procedures in light of moves by Britain, Sweden and other European countries to dial them back. Kavanaugh noted that these countries were “pumping the brakes on this kind of treatment.”

She replied that, unlike Tennessee, those countries haven’t banned the practice. The Biden administration is asking the justices to send the case back to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit to reconsider whether a blanket ban is appropriate. 

But J. Matthew Rice, Tennessee’s Tennessee Solicitor General, argued that the state isn’t discriminating based on a patient’s birth sex, but holding that such treatments cannot be used for the purpose of transitioning.

“Just as using morphine to manage pain differs from using it to assist suicide, using hormones and puberty blockers to address a physical condition is far different from using it to address psychological distress associated with one’s body,” Rice said. 

The liberal justices agreed with Prelogar that the state is treating youth differently based on sex because such treatments would be allowed, for example, in the case of a boy or girl who started puberty too early.

“I’m worried that we’re undermining the foundations of some of our bedrock equal protection cases,” Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said.

The challenge to comes amid questions over what President-elect Donald Trump’s reelection means for both gender-related health care and, more broadly, the future of anti-discrimination protections for LGBTQ youth. During the campaign, in which the issue became highly politicized, Trump vowed to for schools that he says push “radical gender ideology.” He repeatedly warned, , that schools secretly arrange gender transition surgeries for students without their parents’ consent. And with Republicans taking control of both houses of Congress, it becomes more likely that anti-trans laws like those passed by many states could be enacted nationwide.

A showed that a majority of voters think activism over trans people’s rights in government and society has gone too far. That includes some , who have voiced new reservations about trans girls competing on teams that match their gender identity. 

In Wednesday’s hearing — which included American Civil Liberties Union lawyer Chase Strangio, the first known openly trans lawyer to argue before the court — the conservative justices struggled with whether it’s the court’s place to rule in an area where the science is unsettled.

The court’s decision in this case is likely to have a broad impact: Tennessee is one of 26 GOP-led states with banning puberty blockers or hormones for trans youth.

Dr. Susan Lacy, a Memphis gynecologist, and three families, sued the state, claiming the ban violates the Constitution because it treats trans youth differently and violates parents’ rights to make medical decisions for their children. The Biden administration joined the case in support of their arguments.

In 2020, the Supreme Court decided in Bostock v. Clayton County that LGBTQ employees are a protected class in the workplace. Prelogar said the same standard should apply in this instance. 

While the Tennessee case doesn’t directly pertain to schools, court documents detail the educational struggles of its teen litigants. One identified as John Doe “would have an incredibly difficult time wanting to be around other people and go to school” without gender-affirming medical care. Another trans boy using the pseudonym Ryan Roe would throw up before school because of anxiety over puberty and didn’t want to speak with a feminine-sounding voice. After receiving hormone therapy from Vanderbilt University, Ryan began participating more in class. 

The American Academy of Pediatrics such care for transgender and “gender diverse” youth, restating its position as recently as last year in the face of widespread GOP to criminalize the practice. A of 220 trans youth found that the majority who received gender-affirming care were highly satisfied with the treatment at least three years later. Nine regretted taking puberty blockers or hormones, and four stopped taking the medication.

But call the treatments child abuse and reject the phrase “gender-affirming care.” They say the procedures cause irreversible physical harm and that most children would of gender dysphoria if they don’t transition. An from Britain’s National Health Service reinforced their view. Dr. Hilary Cass, the report’s author, concluded that there is insufficient research to determine if the treatments have positive or negative effects, and largely discouraged them. Based on her review, the NHS no longer prescribes puberty blockers or hormones outside of clinical trials. 

“For the majority of young people, a medical pathway may not be the best way to manage their gender-related distress,” the report said. “For those young people for whom a medical pathway is clinically indicated, it is not enough to provide this without also addressing wider mental health and/or psychosocially challenging problems.”

In with The New York Times, she said she disagrees with the American Academy of Pediatrics over the issue and suggests the organization could be “misleading the public.”

Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, incoming chair of the education committee, pointed to the Cass report when he for the Academy to explain why it continues to support the treatments for minors. A spokesman for Cassidy said they have not received a “substantive response.”

As legal challenges to the bans on those treatments reached the federal courts, the and circuits ruled that such practices don’t discriminate against trans youth, allowing the restrictions to stand. But the and circuits sided with opponents of the laws.

On such a divisive issue, Prelogar argued compromise is possible, pointing to a that stopped short of a ban and allows treatment when at least two doctors agree that a patient has gender dysphoria and is at risk of self harm.

“I do think that there is room here for states to enact tailored measures to try to guard against the kind of risk that you’re concerned about,” she told the justices.

The state will close the West Virginia Children’s Home, a residential facility in Elkins for foster children, by the end of the year. The decision to close the 25-bed facility comes as the state on group homes to house foster kids and doesn’t have enough available beds.

The 25-bed , which serves youth ages 12 to 18 years old from any county, is operated by the Department of Human Services. The youth aren’t able to be served in a traditional foster home due to behavioral issues.

The West Virginia Department of Education operates a school on its premises.

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“There have been six to 10 students there for the last 12 to 18 months,” said Jacob Green, superintendent of  West Virginia Schools of Diversion and Transition, adding that three children currently reside at the facility. “There is a new program in Parsons run by Genesis [Foster Care and Adoption Services], and we will be moving resources there.”

Green added that the decision was made after talk of closing the facility for more than two years.

DoHS did not respond to questions for this story about why they will close the facility. Department Secretary Cynthia Persily last year that the West Virginia Children’s Home, built in 1909, had numerous safety concerns involving windows and doors that needed to be addressed.

Hundreds of West Virginia’s 6,135 foster kids are in group homes, according to . There is a , particularly for older children.

Lawmakers and advocates have said kids are continuing to be housed in hotels due to a lack of foster families and available beds in group homes.

Shanna Gray, is the executive director for West Virginia Court Appointed Special Advocates, or CASA.

“Too many children who come into foster care in West Virginia are currently residing in residential facilities, away from family connections,” she said. “It is our hope that the closing of this and other already identified unsafe environments for West Virginia children will force our systems to acknowledge other ways in addressing and curbing the unprecedented influx of children entering [the] foster care system, including building capacity of community support.”

When lawmakers last year discussed possibly closing the facility, Persily cited a that requires West Virginia to operate an “orphanage.”

DoHS did not answer a question about if a different facility would not meet the code’s requirement to house foster children.

An , filed in 2019, alleged the mistreatment of thousands of  foster children in DoHS care; the suit said that a disproportionate number of children were sent to institutions. DoHS in the suit in July, vowing they’d made improvements to the system that included recruiting more foster families. Attorneys suing the state said the problems persist and are planning for a trial in March 2025.

Correction: This story was updated to say that hundreds of West Virginia’s foster children live in group homes. 

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. West Virginia Watch maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Leann Ray for questions: info@westvirginiawatch.com. Follow West Virginia Watch on and .

Two years ago, Katie Switzer for a new school choice program that grants homeschooling families in West Virginia up to $4,900 annually to educate their children.

She was on the winning side when opponents sued to stop the program. But now, she says, the story of the Hope Scholarship has entered a frustrating new chapter. 

Glitches in a new online purchasing system mean she can’t spend funds to order headsets for her three children in online classes. Her kindergartner received the wrong laptop and she spent weeks trying to get a refund. Her kids are among thousands whose learning has been disrupted this school year because orders for curriculum and supplies are backed up. Families have been forced to wait or spend their own money and ask the state for reimbursement. 

“We fought so hard to get this program,” said Switzer, a mother of five and founder of a that has become a forum for dozens of families frustrated with the payment system. “Now we have a number of parents that haven’t received what they ordered.”

In April, the West Virginia State Treasurer’s Office, which runs the Hope Scholarship, awarded a to Indiana-based Student First Technologies to manage purchases and payments to education providers, replacing a non-profit the state contracted with last year. But the system has struggled to keep up as enrollment in the education savings account program jumped from about last year to over 10,000. In late September, almost 3,000 of the 9,000 orders submitted through the company’s platform had not been processed, according to the state. By Thursday, the system had gotten that number down to 1,600 out of 11,300 — or roughly 14% of orders.

Last week, the treasurer’s office held a forum to allow parents to voice their concerns. But Switzer said the meeting was short on hard information.

“I’m like, ‘We want answers; we don’t just want to yell at you,’ ” she said.

Student First’s problems aren’t limited to West Virginia. In a Sept. 16 letter, Arkansas Education Secretary Jacob Oliva told CEO Mark Duran that his company failed to meet deadlines, including one for delivering a “fully operational” purchasing platform for homeschool families participating in the state’s Education Freedom Account program. He followed up with a second Tuesday, canceling the company’s contract as of Dec. 31 and requiring Student First to pay an estimated $563,000 in damages. 

On Wednesday, the state also posted a  for another vendor.

“The failure of Student First to perform its obligations under the contract requires the agency to procure a new contract that, based on the circumstances, will increase the cost to operate the same program,” Oliva wrote.

Student First officials have not returned phone calls or emails for this article.

As Republican-led states continue to adopt and expand ESAs, they are building centralized  systems for homeschooling parents to buy curriculum, services and supplies. Controversy surrounding ESAs has largely focused on isolated cases of fraud, including funds for “ghost students” in Arizona and extravagant parent-purchased items and . But school choice advocates argue that one of the biggest threats to the programs is poor customer service, including online platforms that malfunction or block orders for items that should be allowable. 

Parents are complaining about “long approval wait times and issues with getting invoices paid,” said Mike McShane, director of national research at EdChoice, an advocacy group. “It is tough to say whether it is the platforms or the states that are causing the problems. I imagine if you ask the platforms they’ll blame the states, and if you ask the states they’ll blame the platforms.”

The West Virginia treasurer’s office did not respond to requests for comment.

Last year, McShane states not to skimp on the “slow, laborious and dull work” of implementation. He called the difficulties “teething pains” as states open programs to more families.

‘Through the roof’

Under ESAs, parents can use their accounts to pay for tuition at private schools, or to fund homeschooling expenses or a mixture of in-person and online learning.

Recent data from and other shows that homeschooling rates remain above pre-pandemic levels. In the 2022-23 school year, nearly 6% of students were homeschooled, compared with 2.8% in 2019. ESAs “will potentially expand homeschooling practice even more.” 

While it’s relatively simple to use ESA funds to pay tuition to a private school, advocates say Student First probably didn’t anticipate the flurry of activity from homeschooling families who often place dozens of orders for curriculum and supplies.

“The demand for these programs has been through the roof,” McShane said. “So scaling up the tech and infrastructure is going to take time.”

Critics, however, argue that such “middleman” vendors are not only causing headaches for families, but raising the costs of running the programs themselves. Iowa, for example, upped its contract with Odyssey, a similar payment company, to reflect additional charges for on purchases.

Josh Cowen, a Michigan State University professor and leading voucher opponent, said it’s typical for states to contract with third-party providers to manage publicly funded programs. But Cowen, who recently published about some of the wealthy donors behind the school choice movement, pointed to a “chronic problem” with vendors running ESA programs, especially as the list of allowable items grows.

“I think that the burden should be even higher on states authorizing vendors to explain why we need them and why they’re worth the cost,” he said. 

Arkansas, where the ESA program provides $6,800 per student, awarded a to Student First in April, replacing ClassWallet, the largest company in the sector, with contracts in 11 states. 

The program began in 2023-24, but this is the first year some homeschoolers can participate, including the children of first responders, servicemembers and those in failing schools.

“Not all homeschool families are eligible this year, and it’s really a good thing” given the processing delays, said Lisa Crook, director of Education Alliance, a network of Arkansas homeschooling families. Parents are calling her for answers, but she said the state is reimbursing expenses as fast as it can. “It has been frustrating, but I don’t feel like they have turned a blind eye to us or anything.”

The West Virginia treasurer’s office has also created some temporary workarounds. In a Sept. 23 email, the state said it would reimburse families that had to pay up front for expensive items like school uniforms and musical instruments. But advocates note that not all families can afford to pay for items out of pocket and wait for reimbursements.

In addition to the backlog of orders, Student First’s “TheoPay” platform, for now, only works as an extension to Chrome — a violation of its the program to work across multiple browsers and be mobile-friendly. 

Switzer said parents who lack Chrome or home internet service have come to her house to place orders. 

“This is a high-poverty state,” she said. “Parents can’t use their phones [to place orders] or they can’t use the local library computer to order stuff because you can’t install the Chrome extension on a library computer.”

As director of education partnerships and strategy at the Cardinal Institute for West Virginia Policy, a right-leaning think tank, Tiffany Hoben is an advocate for ESAs. 

She also has an 11-year-old son on a Hope Scholarship. She uses the funds to purchase science, math, and reading materials from different vendors and to pay for tutors. Student First’s website promises “frictionless technology.” But the system is blocking orders for some parents while green-lighting purchases from other families for identical items.

“It’s hard for families,” she said. “It’s like, ‘Well, dang it, I should be able to have this because it’s on the list.’ ”

‘In the dark’

Most states with ESA programs have had some challenges with their payment systems. But in Arizona, which contracts with ClassWallet, many of the kinks have been worked out, said Kathy Visser, who runs a Facebook group for ESA parents. If there are delays with approvals, it’s usually due to a backlog at the state level or because officials have changed the rules about what’s allowed. 

“For the most part, if you contact ClassWallet with an issue, they’re very responsive,” she said. “And if it’s their fault that you had an issue, it’s quickly resolved.”

She worries that problems with vendors in other states will bolster critics’ arguments that ESA’s drain state resources.  

“They’ll say, ‘Look, you can’t even manage the programs,’ ” she said. “They want to make sure parents quit using it. If parents get fed up, then the program fails.”

Hoben, with Cardinal Institute, said in the rush to get West Virginia’s purchasing system in place, families have been kept “in the dark” about why their orders aren’t being processed. 

“Other states,” she said, “are watching us out of the corner of their eye, like ‘God do we even want to mess with this?’ ” 

More than 7,500 public school students in West Virginia transferred from their zoned schools to other schools both in and out of their county during the 2023-24 school year.

Over the last few years, state lawmakers have expanded students’ ability to transfer for education and sports, giving schools limited reasons to deny requests.

West Virginia Department of Education showed that 6,135 students transferred to a school in their county (known as intracounty transfers), and 1,425 students transferred to a public school out of their county.

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Parents accessing child care and after school care was a major driver for transfers in elementary school, where the bulk of the transfers occurred, according to the state education department.

“A vast majority of it is because of the parents and where they’re working and what’s available with day care and things like that at the elementary level,” Sonya White, deputy superintendent of the West Virginia Department of Education, told lawmakers while sharing the data.

High school transfers were less common, White said, and many were due to athletics. A 2023 West Virginia permits student athletes to change schools one time during their high school career without having to change residency. The law to and athlete injuries.

During the 2023-24 school year, 432 athletes to high schools in West Virginia — tripling the number from the number of transfers from the previous year-and-a-half. The West Virginia Secondary Schools and Activities Commission did not return a request for updated numbers for the current school year.

Students transferring within the county do not impact state aid funding unless the student is transferring from a county board of education to a public charter school, according to the WVDE.

Cabell County Schools, one of the state’s largest school districts, had the state’s highest rate of transfers, with 788 students approved to transfers within the county and 136 students transferring out of county.

Keith Thomas, Cabell County Schools’ director of health, wellness and student support services, explained that accessing after-school care or schools closer to parents’ jobs often drove the transfers in his county.

“Not all schools have after-school programs and many of our parents work until five or six,” Thomas said, adding that only some programs accept the state’s .

He added, “A lot of our transfers are that we have parents who are teachers, and they want their kids to go to school with them,” he said.

Accessing special education services also spurred transfers, Thomas said. And some schools are better equipped and certified to teach students with autism.

In Lewis County, Samantha Ribeiro Matos has transferred her six- and seven-year-old boys, who need special education services, to three schools in three years in search of the right academic fit.

One transfer happened after Matos said she found out three days before school started that her zoned elementary school didn’t offer a self-contained classroom, which one of her sons needed. School leaders asked her to transfer the largest elementary school in the county, she said.

“We felt like that was a good option as it was presented to us, but we also did not have a choice,” she said.

State can deny transfers for limited reasons

West Virginia lawmakers expanded students transfer eligibility in 2023 amid the Republican-led Legislature’s . The , signed into law by Gov. Jim Justice, was expansion of 2019 . It allows a county board to permit any eligible student to apply for enrollment in any school in the county as long as the school has the grade-level capacity and certain programs and services that aren’t available in the students’ attendance zone.

The law also allows for open enrollment for public school students between counties without requiring the approval of the county the student resides in prior to transfer.

Denials are permitted for limited reasons, including classroom size limits and student discipline history.

The state education department’s data showed that 483 students were denied transfers last school year. The majority of the denials were students looking to transfer to another school within their county.

White said that a lack of classroom space was the leading reason behind denials.

“The denials are mostly elementary because we have a cap on class sizes in [kindergarten] through five, and we don’t in seventh grade and beyond,” she said.

Jason Huffman, state director for conservative grassroots organization Americans For Prosperity, reviewed county-level denials through information he received through the Freedom of Information Act.

Counties denied student transfers for reasons not permitted under the law, he said, including academic performance, tardies and parent conduct.

“I think particularly with things like absences or tardies, perhaps it is a case that the child is being bullied or or the child is unhappy in their learning situation,” Huffman said. “I don’t think that’s a viable reason to deny a transfer. It kind of disregards the individuality of the student.”

Huffman also noted that only five of the county school districts in the state published their open enrollment data on their website as required under the 2023 law.

He raised these concerns in a letter to education committee leaders in the Legislature, and he wanted the West Virginia Department of Education to remind counties about the appropriate reasons for transfer denials and publishing open enrollment data.

Sen. Patricia Rucker, chair of the Senate’s School Choice Committee, said she had heard from a few parents whose transfers were denied. “When they appealed to the superintendent, transfers were approved,” she said in an email.

“I was actually pleased when seeing the letter from AFP and felt the numbers demonstrate there are hundreds of parents seeking and getting the education they need for their children. And staying in the public education system,” Rucker, R-Berkeley, continued.

Christy Day, spokesperson for the education department, said the department will continue to work with county school systems to assist them with compliance with the resident and non-resident transfer statute.

Huffman said his organization plans to continue the implementation of the law.

“We want to make sure that the intent that lawmakers wanted to give to parents — the power of choice — is being followed to the full fruition of the law,” he said. “It’s for the future of the children in our state.”

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. West Virginia Watch maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Leann Ray for questions: info@westvirginiawatch.com. Follow West Virginia Watch on and .

Dominique Bryant made the switch for her 10-year-old after two years of watching him struggle with reading. She first noticed how far behind Malcolm was in second grade when he couldn’t read the instructions on a homework assignment. 

“I looked in his face and he just was so defeated. I said ‘I’ve got to do something else,’” she said. Now her two daughters, Ebony and Aviana, attend the school as well.

One way Burbrella stands out in a growing marketplace of unconventional school options is by grouping students of similar ages and learning needs together in pods — a format that a lot of families became familiar with during the pandemic. The school, however, takes a more mainstream approach to measuring how well students learn math and reading. Teachers turn to some of the same assessments still used in traditional public schools, like the Iowa tests to pinpoint students’ skills when they first enroll and i-Ready to monitor progress throughout the year. 

“We look for their strengths, their interests, and we integrate that into play, nature and projects — just to really make learning fun — but also to close the gaps they have academically,” said Dominique Burgess, the school’s founder.

Her reliance on widely used assessments is not unique in the expanding universe of school choice options, according to a from Vela, a nonprofit that promotes and provides grants to such programs. Most leaders of unconventional schools use methods like observation, student presentations and projects to track progress, but more than half also use standardized tests or assessments built into online curriculum — like DreamBox and Zearn. Leaders of such programs say parents are their number one audience for the data. But with more states allowing families to use public funds for tuition at microschools and other private school programs, there’s also for greater transparency into how students stack up against their peers in district schools.

Burgess, previously a public and charter school educator, doesn’t have a problem with that. 

“I think we’re at a very pivotal point in this whole movement,” said Burgess, who also has an online program that serves students from 19 states. “A lot of what we’re doing needs a light shined on it — not just for parents to say ‘Oh, it’s something different. Let me go try it’ — but more so the country can see this might be the new way of educating kids and providing families with choice.”

Vela, with a network of 3,000 founders of alternative schools, was “uniquely positioned” to survey leaders on how their schools define and measure student success, said Meredith Olson, president and CEO. 

Of the 223 programs that responded, 70% said they track academic progress, but ranked developing students’ critical thinking and problem-solving skills as more important than reading and literacy skills — 74% and 66%, respectively. Nearly 40% of the school programs said they measure math skills, and 13% said they don’t track anything. 

Programs using digital tools are more likely to capture student assessment data using education technology from Khan Academy than any other program, Vela found in its survey. More than half of school founders said they use the popular website, with much smaller percentages using Lexia for reading (24%) or Zearn for math (15%).

Laurie Hensley, who runs the Learning Essentials microschool on an acre of property southeast of Phoenix, doesn’t let her students move to the next level until they score at least 90% in Lexia. Sometimes she “has a little chat” with parents if their child still can’t master a lesson after multiple attempts.

“But most of the time kids are progressing,” said Hensley, who worked as a paraprofessional in a charter school before launching her own program five years ago. “The whole point of being out of a public school is that they progress, even if it’s slower. As long as they’re moving forward, I don’t worry about them.”

Doug Harris, a Tulane University economist who studies school choice, including education savings accounts, said he’s not surprised that many microschool leaders rely on Khan Academy to tell them how students are performing. 

“Microschools have only one or two teachers and they can’t be expert in, or create assessments for, such a wide variety of material,” he said. But even if public funds are paying for students to attend a microschool, the public won’t necessarily see that data. “Khan doesn’t provide useful info to anyone but those families and educators in the school.” 

That’s not good enough for many opponents of ESAs, especially those in Arizona, which places no academic requirements on private programs that serve students with public funds. Criticism has spiked in recent months as the state makes to accommodate growth in the program. 

Holding microschools accountable

“Microschools propped up by taxpayer funds should be held to the same standards as public schools, which means they should take the same tests and post the same level of results,” said Beth Lewis, executive director of Save Our Schools Arizona, a public school advocacy organization that strongly opposes the state’s ESA program. “Otherwise, it’s not really about school choice at all, since parents don’t have access to any information about the microschool’s academics. And taxpayers have zero information about their return on investment.”

Jenn Kelly, who runs Education Through Adventure microschool in Scottsdale, agrees that ESA-funded programs should be held accountable for student achievement. But she thinks portfolios full of student work provide a more accurate picture than tests. The question, she said, is who would review the assignments.  

The state education department’s ESA staff “is already overloaded with purchasing and vendor pay requests,” said Kelly, a former special education teacher in district, charter and Catholic schools. “What happens if a child does not show any growth … from year to year? Does the state pull the ESA funding for that child? Every answer raises more questions.”

Unlike Arizona, some states with ESAs or vouchers, like West Virginia and North Carolina, require programs to administer either state tests, or another standardized assessment, and submit the data to the state. 

In West Virginia, Michael Parsons, who runs Vandalia Community School in Charleston, said he’s interested in how students in his school compare with those in other microschools, as well as those in public schools. But he’s most concerned about his students making progress. 

“Most important as a teacher is accountability to my students and their growth, and as an administrator, accountability to my staff,” he said. “If I can keep those two things on par, then accountability to parents, taxpayers, regulators happens by default.”

At Burbrella, Burgess said she could have given the same end-of-grade assessments that students in North Carolina public schools take, allowing for a direct comparison, but she described them as “not kid-friendly” and decided against it. 

One reason parents seek out is because they feel public schools have a narrow focus on testing. 

Bryant remembers how stressed her oldest daughter Ebony would get before state tests in New York City, where they lived before relocating to Burlington.

“She freezes up and does terribly. Compared to her performance in school, it was like night and day,” she said. At Burbrella, assessments don’t create the same level of anxiety. “It’s more like, ‘We’re going to assess where you are, and then we’re gonna work from there.’ ”   

Disclosure: Walton Family Foundation, Stand Together Trust and the Beth and Ravenel Curry Foundation provide financial support to Vela and to The 74. 

While issues have plagued the federal government’s revamp of the application for student aid, West Virginia’s higher education leaders say help from Gov. Jim Justice and the state Legislature have caused the state to be much better off than others.

The 2024-2025 Free Application for Federal Student Aid forms debuted in January, than it’s typically available.

In April, over , allowing West Virginia students to bypass filling out the form and still be eligible for state school aid including the Promise Scholarship and the Higher Education Grant Program.

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In addition to the state of emergency, redirecting about $83.2 million from the state’s rainy day fund to the state Higher Education Policy Commission to be distributed to college-bound students for the fall college 2024 semester.

“By having the flexibility to make these adjustments, we have been able to alleviate student concerns about being able to afford to go to college this fall,” said Jessica Tice, senior director of communication for the state HECP. “We look forward to seeing final enrollment and award numbers in the coming months.”

The commission awarded funding through the Higher Education Grant Program to 43 ,510 students for the 2024-25 school year, up from 31,867 students awarded in the 2023-2024 year, Tice said. She added that the commission does not anticipate that every student who was awarded funding will use it.

In addition, 30 students who qualified for the Promise Scholarship but did not have a current FAFSA on file were awarded the scholarship as a direct result of the change, she said.

As of Monday, 63,291 West Virginia students had completed the FAFSA, Tice said.

Tice said the additional funding from the Legislature allowed the HEPC to increase the amount of the grant award from $3,300 last year to $6,800 this year.

“This is an unprecedented one-time amount for students who have financial need,” Tice said.

Also, the HEPC provided funding to institutions to allow them to provide $2,000 College Access Grants to students with more need, she said.

Tice said the concerns about the 2024-2025 FAFSA form are largely at the colleges and university level now. The federal Department of Education recently announced that colleges and universities won’t be able to submit batch corrections to files for aid this cycle, which will put a burden on the institutions, she said.

West Virginia University is receiving and processing the 2024-25 FAFSA and disbursements are on schedule, said April Kaull, executive director of communications. The first day of classes at WVU is Aug. 21.

“We want students and their families to know that they should apply for federal or state aid for fall 2024,” Kaull said. “If they’ve put it off or become frustrated and thrown in the towel, we can help. It is not too late to get financial aid in place for a successful start to the fall semester.”

Tice said higher education officials are concerned about the rollout of the 2025-2026 FAFSA form, which is expected to be

“As we continue working at the state level to do everything we can to award students state aid despite their FAFSA status, we are very concerned about the impact of another delay,” Tice said. “The FAFSA allows students to maximize their financial aid beyond state programs, and we want all of our students — especially those with financial need — to be able to access all of the funding they are eligible to receive.”

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. West Virginia Watch maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Leann Ray for questions: info@westvirginiawatch.com. Follow West Virginia Watch on and .

Now, with the start of the next financial aid season less than three months away, the U.S. Department of Education won’t promise it can avoid a repeat.

The department is “working toward” opening the Free Application for Federal Student Aid on time and ensuring “a smooth experience,” a spokesperson told The 74, but dismissed last week’s bipartisan vote by the House education committee to legally enforce an Oct. 1 start as an unhelpful “political stunt.”

comes as financial aid officials are dealing with another delay hindering some students from receiving final aid packages for the fall. The complications have also deterred others from even applying for assistance. Completion rates remain below last year’s rate, suggesting enrollment will stay down this fall.

“Are we going to close the gap? It would be a really herculean effort,” said Bill DeBaun, senior director for data and strategic initiatives at the National College Attainment Network, an organization of college access organizations. Summer, he said, isn’t typically FAFSA season. But even increasing the rate by 3 or 4 percentage points would mean “tens of thousands of additional” students receiving funds for college. 

Members of Congress say forcing the department to release next year’s FAFSA on Oct. 1 will avoid the confusion and chaos that families and colleges endured this year. “Establishing a hard deadline … will provide students, families and schools with much needed clarity and stability,” Republican Rep. Virginia Foxx of North Carolina, who chairs the House education committee, said before the July 10 vote.

Six Democrats on the committee who voted against the bill argued that Congress didn’t provide to help the department make the switch and predicted it could lead to even more errors. 

“I want FAFSA to work; we all want FAFSA to work,” said Virginia Rep. Bobby Scott, the ranking Democrat on the committee. “What we don’t want is for the department to rush to meet arbitrary deadlines and push out a FAFSA form once again that has the same technical problems.”

‘A lot of anxiety’

Schools that predominantly serve students whose parents are not U.S. citizens — the population most harmed by the FAFSA overhaul — have been especially stressed.

“It’s been a rollercoaster,” said Ingrid Fragoso, a counselor at KIPP Austin Collegiate in Texas. Only about 10% of the charter school’s students have parents with social security numbers. The redesign first blocked them from completing the form and then required  to submit it. “In the beginning, there was a lot of anxiety around how to help our students.”

At the peak of the chaos, in February and March, the counseling team phoned the department daily to troubleshoot issues for families. While waiting on hold, the counselors used a detailed grid of each senior’s schedule to quickly grab students from class when a department staffer came on the line. For parents with limited English skills, they held practice sessions prior to calls. Now, all 91 students going to four-year schools have received aid packages.

Some counselors and higher education officials say they’re beginning to see the streamlined FAFSA’s potential.

“I feel a lot better about where we’re at than I did a few weeks ago,” said Karen Krause, the executive director of financial aid at the University of Texas at Arlington. The FAFSA completion rate is up 4% compared to last year, bucking and national trends, and the staff was able to begin distributing aid offers in April — ahead of many other . “I do think it’s going to be a better process for students and families.”

When FAFSA works, it works quickly — sometimes in less than 10 minutes. Students and parents who have submitted the forms, she said, keep asking, “Is that all?” The education department also kept to conduct fewer reviews of students’ forms. At UT Arlington, that number dropped dramatically, from over 5,300 last year to under 200, Krause said. 

At the same time, her staff is grappling with a new setback — a backlog of corrections the department . Those revisions ultimately affect how much money colleges can offer students, especially those whose financial circumstances changed since they first applied.

“Say a family member loses a job or there are medical expenses,” explained Jill Desjean, director of policy analysis at the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators. In those cases, schools might issue a new offer to make tuition more affordable, but those figures won’t be official until the education department approves them. 

Currently, colleges can only one at a time.

“It’s manual and it’s way more work,” Desjean said. 

But they can’t submit them in bulk until next month, a time when students are usually preparing to register for classes and move into dorms. 

‘Answers for kids’ 

If higher education officials feel any sense of relief after such a stormy season, it’s partly because of their own work to ensure families don’t pay the price for FAFSA’s botched implementation. UT Arlington, for one, has waived late fees for students still waiting on federal aid and isn’t dropping them from summer classes if they can’t make tuition payments, Krause said.

West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice declared a state of emergency over FAFSA, allowing students to apply for state aid without completing the federal form. The move made 17,000 students eligible for merit- or need-based aid, according to a state higher education commission.

And at the University of Florida, Mary Parker, vice president for enrollment management, created a special that offers low-income students up to $15,000 to tide them over until their federal aid comes through. If they end up qualifying for less federal aid than the scholarship covers, they won’t have to make up the difference.

That short-term fix impressed one university official who understands the strain on families with first-time college students.

“It will not be perfect, but [Parker] had enough in her budget to eat the cost of the margin of error. It was more important to prioritize first-generation students,” said Penny Schwinn, the former Tennessee education commissioner who now serves as vice president for the university’s “pre-K to pre-bachelors” initiatives. “K-12 and states are wrestling with this, and it was a really proud moment to see my colleague find innovative and immediate answers for kids.”

But colleges are taking risks when they use their own funds to lower tuition costs for students, said Desjean, with the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators.

“Not all schools can afford to front their own money while waiting for the federal dollars,” she said. “But it’s great to see that those who are able are doing what they can to minimize harm to students.”

In a decision last week, the Hope Scholarship Board also directed state Treasurer Riley Moore’s office, which runs the program, to turn their findings over to the state auditor for possible criminal charges. 

The 74 first reported in March that Hive Learning Academy, an education startup operating out of a rented house, was part of a state investigation into scholarship violations. One parent said the school abruptly stopped serving his son’s age group after only three days, made no mention of a refund and didn’t answer questions. Another said there were no set meal times and students just grabbed their lunches from the refrigerator.

Parents alerted officials to the problems, but Kaela Zimmerman, the homeschool parent who opened the program, said the state bears some responsibility.

“I feel like they are trying to make an example out of us to set a precedent even though the system truly failed us last year,” she told The 74. She added that she had no plans to reopen anyway. “It was a learning process for everyone. I wish they were willing to admit that and understand that we all did the best we could with the resources we had at the time.”

While the Martinsburg-based school ultimately served just eight students, the controversy raised larger questions nationwide about the expertise of those who start schools with public funds. Critics of such programs, known as education savings accounts, say there is and that students suffer when programs abruptly close. But school choice supporters used the school’s failure to argue that market-based approaches like those in West Virginia work. 

“This is the flashpoint for the conversation about what is accountability with education savings accounts,” said Michael Horn, co-founder of the Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation, a nonprofit think tank. He on the topic at a conference in April and said drawing attention to problems and solutions will make programs better. 

Don Soifer, who leads the National Microschooling Center, an advocacy group, noted that West Virginia lawmakers voted last year to allow families to spend at microschools, but didn’t follow up with clear guidance on how the unconventional programs could participate.

“West Virginia simply had not anticipated a microschooling movement, and government was slow to respond,” he said. While the requirements on school founders are minimal — they must subject staff to criminal background checks and notify districts when students enroll — Soifer said the level of awareness in the state about the small programs has grown. “Things seem a whole lot better now. But the start was tricky.”

‘Everything was returned’

Launching the Hive was a greater risk than Zimmerman anticipated. She and a business partner opened the program last August and, lacking sufficient startup funds, dipped into their own money for furniture and supplies. Parents quickly spotted signs of trouble. The school’s schedule was inconsistent as operators worked other jobs to pay bills. Parents who visited the schools saw little evidence of academic work.

Ultimately, Zimmerman repaid the state over $15,000 and said she doesn’t understand why officials say she could face criminal charges. 

“Everything was returned that needed to be returned,” she said. “No one from the Hope board has reached out to me a single time since they received our refunds.”

Jared Hunt, spokesman for the treasurer’s office, said the board sent Zimmerman notice of the official action and information on how to appeal. But he declined to answer additional questions due to the ongoing investigation. 

To observers like Horn, the episode prompts additional questions for both parents and entrepreneurs seeking to open microschools.

“We’re in an environment where you’re seeing so many different microschools pop up with so many educators of different stripes starting them,” he said. “What’s the role of the state? What’s the role of parents? What’s the role of marketplaces in which students and families are making choices?”

Six West Virginia schools were notified Thursday that policies in their student handbooks may violate students’ First Amendment rights by requiring them to participate in certain activities like standing for flag-raising ceremonies and the Pledge of Allegiance and removing hats for the national anthem, among other things.

The notice — which was sent as to the schools — came from the West Virginia arm of the American Civil Liberties Union on the 81st anniversary of the landmark legal case West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette. In 1949, The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in that case that students cannot be forced or compelled to salute a flag or recite the Pledge in schools. Policies that direct otherwise, according to the case, are a clear violation of the students’ freedom of speech.

“The Constitution affords protection for Americans to freely express our beliefs and ideas. That protection expands beyond written and spoken word; it extends to symbolic speech as well,” ACLU-WV Legal Director Aubrey Sparks wrote in the letter. “One powerful way that people can express themselves is by choosing to remain silent when everyone else is agreeing, or remaining sitting when everyone else stands. Barnette codified that right. Students still have that right in schools today.”

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Staff from the ACLU, according to a , reviewed student handbooks for all schools in the state to ensure their policies were compliant with the rulings in Barnette.

Schools that received the letters due to having policies in violation of the law are: Calhoun Middle/High School, Riverside High School in Kanawha County, Summers County Comprehensive High School, Richwood High School in Nicholas County, Sissonville Middle School in Kanawha County and John Adams Middle School, also in Kanawha County.

The policies in the student handbook vary school by school.

Riverside High, for example, that students must rise and remove hats during the national anthem and flag ceremonies held during extracurricular activities.

At and middle schools, the handbooks state that students must stand for the Pledge of Allegiance during class. If they don’t recite the Pledge, they must remain silent.

The letters sent Thursday urge leaders at the listed schools to review their policies with consideration of the Barnette ruling and amend them if needed to “ensure that they meet constitutional obligations.”

“Schools are often the first places that students learn about their civic obligations, their constitutional rights, and the importance of being brave enough to engage in speech that’s not always popular,” Sparks wrote in the letter. “The First Amendment exists to safeguard the diversity of thought and expression, which are essential components of a thriving democratic society. Protecting free speech in public schools is paramount, something that was determined by the Supreme Court in West Virginia v. Barnette eighty-one years ago.”

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. West Virginia Watch maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Leann Ray for questions: info@westvirginiawatch.com. Follow West Virginia Watch on and .

With just a few hours remaining until the midnight deposit deadline, West Virginia high school senior Sam Dodson thought he knew which university he’d commit to for the fall but second thoughts were bubbling up. Accepted to a number of prestigious institutions, he had narrowed his final choice down to two: Columbia University and Dartmouth College.

There were multiple considerations at play: academic opportunities; social life; Manhattan’s Upper West Side vs. bucolic Hanover, New Hampshire. And over the past few weeks a new one had emerged: the quickly spreading pro-Palestinian campus protests and subsequent arrests for which Columbia was ground zero.

Dodson was one of these students, watching closely as protesters occupying Columbia’s Hamilton Hall were cleared from the building Tuesday by the New York Police Department.. 

“All of that made me wait until kind of the last minute to officially decide,” the track runner told The 74.

The class of 2024 has had a high school experience bookended by jarring national news, their freshman year coinciding with school shutdowns and COVID-era virtual learning and their senior year ending amid a volatile movement protesting Israel’s assault in Gaza that has swept up dozens of colleges and brought over 2,000 arrests, according to a tally. As seniors weigh options for their future universities, some are looking to the actions of college student activists and the responses of their respective administrations before making final decisions.

“I do think that all of the turmoil and things that are going on definitely had me reconsidering. It had me having second thoughts about different things and had me, I guess, take second looks at different schools,” Dodson said. “But ultimately I guess I tried to look past anything with that and understand that this is a choice I’m making for the next four years and what I think would be the best experience for me — academically, personally, in terms of just student life. All of those things.”

Dodson’s experiences are reflective of as well. Safa Al-Omari, a senior at NYC’s The Laboratory School of Finance and Technology told she is still deciding between City College and Hunter College. The Yemeni student said she wants to do more research about City College’s response to the protests before she commits.

“Being Middle Eastern, I have a lot of feelings about what’s going on,” Al-Omari said. “I would not want to go to a college that is arresting students based on them speaking for people who are suffering.”

For Sam Dodson’s mom, Sarah, there were also conflicting emotions. “It’s very hard to put the ‘yes’ when you have a lot of … chaos,” she said. While she said her son was drawn to the diversity of perspectives on Columbia’s campus, the more heated elements of the past few weeks have given him pause. At the same time, she emphasized the importance of being in a higher education space where free speech is strongly respected and encouraged. 

“You never want your kid to go to a school that is on the national news because of police involvement, right? It just doesn’t sit really well,” she said. “However, I guess I am under the assumption that there’s going to be resolution … I’m guessing because this is a college platform that they are going to hopefully have more engaging, open conversations so that there can be some sort of — I don’t know — persistence of everyday campus life that is not so inflamed.”

For now, all academic activities on Columbia’s Morningside Heights campus — including finals — have been moved fully remote for the remainder of the semester. On May 6, the school to cancel the university-wide commencement scheduled for May 15 and instead focus on school-level graduation ceremonies. The NYPD had been asked to maintain a police presence until two days after the main commencement; it was not immediately clear how the cancellation might impact that.

Sam Dodson, who began his freshman year of high school in hybrid learning, said it would be frustrating if his first year of college classes also goes remote because of campus unrest. On the other hand, “there’s something interesting about being in the center of the news or the center of exactly what’s happening.” 

Students reconsider and recommit

It was about two week after pro-Palestinian students and activists on Columbia’s campus first erected the “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” that a group occupied Hamilton Hall, a building with a long history of . Hours later, the cops moved in, arresting, 112 people, including 32 who were not affiliated with the university. 

By this point, the movement had spread across the country, including to Dodson’s other contender, Dartmouth, where nearly were arrested this week. About a week and half before that escalation, Columbia hosted its accepted students weekend and Dodson was there. 

He took some time, he said, to wander around campus and speak with protesting students near the encampment. “They were like, ‘Hey, new Columbia students. Come talk to us!’ You know, I guess, they were very like welcoming. They were very much wanting to talk with the admitted students, which I thought was a nice thing.”

While he was disappointed that many of the accepted student weekend activities had been canceled or modified, he was grateful he got to experience the events on campus firsthand and form his own views.   

Around the same time, another high school senior Lila Ellis, who uses they/ them pronouns, was also closely observing the activities on Columbia’s campus. A Jewish student from Massachusetts, they had committed months before to the dual-degree joint program between Columbia University and the Jewish Theological Seminary.

Ellis said that because of their religion, they’re concerned there are certain places on campus they won’t be welcomed. “I think that to just stay away from all secular extracurriculars entirely, is a disservice to myself and to the community as a whole,” they said. “And I’m just thinking about, like, how am I going to balance that while also, you know, recognizing that some spaces don’t want me in them?”

Ellis pointed to the example of a protester outside the gates of campus , “Go back to Poland,” at Jewish students. Recently, a January video of one of the student protest leaders, Khymani James, began circulating in which he said, “be grateful that I’m not just going out and murdering Zionists.” He has since been barred from campus and released a of apology. 

Notably, as reported by , protests within the encampment were on the whole peaceful and included Jewish students, though others on campus agreed with Ellis that anti-Zionist rhetoric made them feel unwelcomed. 

While Ellis is sticking with their decision to attend Columbia, they did briefly toy with the idea of a gap year or of moving core curriculum requirements around to stay away from the main campus for a while. 

“I really do want to be in this program,” they said, “And it’s just a matter of thinking about ‘How do we make that work with what’s happening at Columbia?’ rather than ‘Can it work?’ Because I think it can work.” 

As Ellis prepares to enroll for classes — especially literature overview courses on Columbia’s campus — they’re considering a number of factors including whether or not the professors taught from the encampment. 

“Hopefully,” they said, “it’s not an issue in the fall, but just thinking about who were the professors who were willing to do that? And is that an environment that I want to be in for learning and for having an open discussion?”

Their father, Andy Ellis, added his own apprehension. All parents, he said, are nervous to send their first child off to college. But the protests on campus, he said, add an extra dimension, especially for a Jewish student. 

Ellis, a graduate of MIT, has spent significant time in higher education. He said he was on a Harvard visiting committee and in an academic center there for the last decade but resigned from both positions in October, “when it became clear that people were ripping off their mask around anti-semitism.” 

He said that if he were a current student on Columbia’s campus, he would be on the front lines of the counter-protests, displaying footage from Hamas’s Oct. 7 terror attack on Israel.

“I think I would be that person,” the consultant said, “But I know that Lila is not that person. But I also know that Lila is not going to just duck [their]head and stay completely quiet, but I think find a balanced view. Listening to what Lila said about, you know, ‘find the humanity’ is an amazing, generous take. I’m really proud that I think we’ve created somebody who has a better moral compass than I do because I’m a lot more angry.”

Back in West Virginia and with time to spare before Wednesday’s midnight deadline, Dodson had finalized his decision: He committed to be a member of the class of 2028 at Columbia where he plans to study political science and government. 

“I think it’ll just be interesting,” he said, ”to go from — to take my perspective from this kind of small town area where like, I mean, I’ve met people from other places. I try to read, I try to keep myself exposed to those things, but it’d be cool to actually meet people from all sorts of perspectives and all sorts of backgrounds.”

Citing issues with the federal government’s rollout of a new application for student aid, Gov. Jim Justice on Tuesday declared a state of emergency and suspended a requirement that college-bound high school seniors fill out the Free Application for Federal Student Aid in order to receive state financial aid, including the Promise Scholarship and the Higher Education Grant Program.

The FAFSA form is required for applying for federal student aid and used to determine a student’s financial need. The form recently went through — its first massive revamp in more than 40 years — in an effort to streamline the process.

The changes are supposed to result in more students being eligible for financial aid, especially low-income students. The new FAFSA went live in January, three months later than the application is typically available, and has been plagued by a number of glitches and problems that have caused further delays.

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Justice said Tuesday the issues with the FAFSA have resulted in a 40% reduction in West Virginia high school FAFSA completion rates and have left students wondering if they’ll be able to go to college.

“So the way around this is for the governor to declare a state of emergency … in education that we can bypass this FAFSA stuff and we can at least get on with getting our kids the state funding,” Justice said during his administration briefing Tuesday.

Under the emergency proclamation, students who apply for and qualify for the Promise Scholarship by Sept. 1, 2024, will receive an award of up to $5,500 for the 2024-25 academic year. Students who completed a 2023-24 FAFSA who qualify for the need-based Higher Education Grant, will receive up to $3,400 for the fall semester.

Students who don’t have a previous FAFSA on file but are eligible for SNAP, TANF, Medicaid, CHIP, Child Care Subsidy Program or WIC can show their eligibility letter to their higher education institution’s financial aid office to receive the Higher Education Grant.

In a news release, Sarah Tucker, the state’s chancellor of higher education, said the cost of college is one of the biggest hurdles students — especially low-income students — face when planning for education after high school.

“That’s why our state has invested so strongly in our own financial aid programs — which, combined, total more than $100 million each year for West Virginia students,” she said. “I thank Governor Justice for his strong leadership and allowing students to access these funds this year despite their FAFSA status. And I encourage students to continue working to complete the FAFSA so that they can get as much money from other sources, including the federal government, as possible.”

The federal Department of Education on Tuesday encouraged students to fill out the FAFSA, saying that issues with the application have been resolved, .

Justice encouraged students and parents to call a state hotline at 1-877-987-7664 or visit for more information and assistance with applying for aid.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. West Virginia Watch maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Leann Ray for questions: info@westvirginiawatch.com. Follow West Virginia Watch on and .