Charleston Gazette-Mail – In a Gazette-Mail story from July 10 about the growing cost of the Hope Scholarship, West Virginia Treasurer Larry Pack admitted something that has never been said aloud before. “[H]is office believes only about 10% of the more than 10,000 students who received the Hope Scholarship last year were enrolled in public school before transferring to private school or homeschool settings.”
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Soon after, a senior adviser for the Treasurer’s Office confirmed on X, “I believe this question was more focused on how many would have done alternative education without Hope which would be still 85-90% of students.”
Put more bluntly, what they both are saying is that most students using the Hope Scholarship were never in the public school system to begin with and had already chosen private school or homeschool without the Hope Scholarship. That means just 1/10 of its ballooning costs are going to those the program was promised for: families who couldn’t access alternative education options without it.
