Public schools across the Mountain State have been working to overcome challenges to high-quality and equitable public education including declining student enrollment, insufficient funding, and diversion of funding and resources to the Hope Scholarship. With little progress made to address these challenges during the regular legislative session, school districts have been forced to resort to staff cuts, school closures and consolidations, and cuts to programming and opportunities for students in order to reduce costs and continue to serve their students and communities at large.
The Cabell County Board of Education recently finalized the budget for next school year, which included a $4.5 million reduction compared to this school year’s budget. The district will reduce spending across several areas including instruction, staffing, student transportation, and food services. District leadership pointed to enrollment loss, the Hope Scholarship, and the expiration of federal pandemic-era relief funding as contributors to the budget cut and noted that without the county’s excess levy–which provides over $24.1 million in funding from local taxes for staff pay and benefits, supplies and technology, and maintenance–the cuts would have been more severe.
Staffing is one area where school districts can more easily reduce costs when funding is at risk compared to other areas like school operations and maintenance. The Cabell County Board of Education approved more than 200 transfers and terminations last month, which will affect teachers across grade levels and subjects, classroom aides, school counselors, bus operators, cooks, custodians, extracurricular positions, and many more. There has been a persistent trend of undermining student support despite the growing mental health needs of students across the country and in West Virginia. This is evident from the cuts to federal grants that support hiring school mental health professionals to the continued cuts to the school mental health workforce in West Virginia and inadequate policy solutions, like HB 3209. In the absence of adequate and equitable funding, school districts across our state will continue to be forced to cut staff and reduce spending, leaving student support staff like school counselors and social workers in jeopardy.
Cabell County currently has 12 elementary schools that each have a counselor; however, following the recent staff cuts, six of these positions will be eliminated next school year. This will leave one counselor to cover two elementary schools rather than each elementary school having a dedicated counselor. Superintendent Hardesty pointed to HB 3209, which passed in the 2025 regular legislative session and allowed for this harmful blow to student support. The original aim of the bill was to increase student support by providing funding and mandated ratios for school counselors. After significant changes, the bill now provides no additional funding or resources to support existing counselors or to hire new counselors. This leaves some school districts, like Cabell County, underresourced and unable to maintain their existing school counselor positions.
The Hope Scholarship is a major contributor to the enrollment and funding loss in Cabell County. During the 2023-2024 school year, Cabell County had the fifth highest number of participants at 289, which was more than double the number from the previous year. The growing use of the Hope Scholarship will likely continue in Cabell County due to the high number of private schools in the area. Cabell County has six private schools and is one of just 10 counties in the state with more than five private schools. Private schools in this county received about $1.2 million in Hope Scholarship funds last school year, a nearly three-fold increase compared to the previous year’s amount of about $428,000.
While proponents of the Hope Scholarship argue that the program supports educational choice and increased opportunities for students, most families that benefit from this program likely already have the financial means and access to pursue education outside of the public school system. The annual tuition at many private schools exceeds the annual award for the Hope Scholarship. The Covenant School in Huntington received more than $400,000 in Hope Scholarship funds last school year, one of the largest amounts received by any school in the state. Tuition at this school is $8,600 per student, which is about $3,300 more than the expected annual award for the Hope Scholarship for the upcoming school year. Further, tuition is due to the school in May, months before participating families even have access to their awarded Hope Scholarship funds.
West Virginia children are entitled to a quality public education system, but with the growing Hope Scholarship, the outdated school funding formula, and the lack of policy solutions to address the challenges that public schools in our state face, the public education system is at risk. To preserve and strengthen our public education system, legislators need to stop the expansion of the Hope Scholarship and implement program guardrails, modernize the school funding formula, and pass legislation that effectively addresses the challenges that public schools face.
