Children in West Virginia are constitutionally guaranteed a thorough and efficient system of free schools provided by the legislature. In recent years, our public education system has faced mounting challenges including declining enrollment, declining state revenues due to tax cuts, increased disinvestment through the Hope Scholarship, and threats to federal funding and support for public education. These challenges have placed the constitutional guarantee of public education at risk for the nearly 90 percent of school-aged children in our state who attend public schools. Many of these challenges could have been addressed during the 2025 legislative session, however very few beneficial bills received the attention that they deserved while more harmful bills were allowed to advance.
Although several bills aimed at increasing investment in public schools through improving the funding formula and enhancing pay for school employees were introduced this session, none ultimately passed. One bill in particular, SB 471, aimed to modify the funding formula to provide additional funding according to the type of students served by school districts (e.g., students from low-income families, students with disabilities, students in rural schools). This approach would have more equitably funded students with greater needs, which would be especially beneficial to the wide range of students that attend WV public schools. More than half of students in West Virginia public schools are from low-income families and one in five have a disability or receive special education services. Similarly, bills to increase pay for educators and service personnel failed to gain the traction needed to pass, despite pay ranking far below all neighboring states. While no significant progress was made in these areas, Governor Morrisey has expressed plans to revisit the school funding formula and PEIA during special sessions later this year.
Behavioral and socioemotional challenges among students have been a growing concern for schools in recent years. This has led to a trend of stricter and more exclusionary discipline policies despite evidence that these policies do not adequately address student behavioral issues, and contribute to negative outcomes among students and disparities across student groups. This trend continued into the 2025 session with several bills considered that aimed to expand current use of exclusionary discipline to elementary aged students, promote punitive action for classroom disruptions, and, in the case of HB 2545, to allow for the use of corporal punishment.
While legislators had the opportunity to prioritize support over punishment and provide increased mental, social, and emotional support for students with HB 3209, after significant amendments the bill that passed may be ineffective or even harmful. This bill aimed to provide critical funding to school districts to ensure that they would be appropriately staffed with school counselors for their student population and that every school in the state would have at least one school counselor. Ultimately, rather than increasing funding for professional support personnel, which includes school counselors, nurses, social workers, and psychologists, HB 3209 simply requires that school districts allocate two of their existing five professional support personnel slots to school counselors. In its final form, this legislation provides school districts with no new resources to hire school counselors, it just constrains them within an existing funding stream and could even create unintended consequences of reducing nurses, social workers, or school psychologists to comply with the new requirement while many districts are already understaffed for student support.
Non-public education settings including private schools, homeschools, and microschools already have limited regulations and accountability measures when compared to public schools in our state. A few bills that were introduced this session aimed to further weaken regulations and accountability measures for non-public education. SB 914, which passed the legislature but has not been signed by the governor at the time of publication, will remove the requirement for private, parochial, and religious schools to maintain student performance on testing above a certain level and to implement remediation when performance is below that level. Testing is essentially the only accountability measure for Hope Scholarship students at non-public schools aside from attendance, and research shows mixed or negative results on academic performance for students that use voucher programs to attend non-public schools.
Last year, non-public schools received more than $16 million in public funds through the Hope Scholarship and this is will only grow with the expected cost of the program for next school year surpassing $100 million. Although some legislators expressed concerns over the growing cost of the program, there haven’t been any significant efforts to curtail it.
Following the 2025 session, challenges persist for public education in West Virginia. Legislators are still accountable for the guarantee of public education outlined in our state constitution and they need to reaffirm their commitment to the children of this state. As we progress toward interims and special sessions, legislators should consider the following recommendations.
