By Stephen Smoot
For three years, the HOPE Scholarship has helped students and families who have been seeking support to attend non traditional educational experiences. This month Larry Pack, as part of his role as West Virginia Treasurer, released the annual report detailing its evolution.
In the 2024-25 school year, the number of recipients of HOPE Scholarships approximately doubled. The initial offering in the 2022-23 school year attracted 2,333 students while 5,443 took advantage of the program in the next school year. The 2024-25 school year showed participants topping 10,000 for the first time ever, at 10,530.
Amount of awards distributed per student has not increased by much, however, rising from $4,298 in 2023-24 to $4,921.35 in 2024-25. Most West Virginia traditional public education systems receive $14,575 per student.
The school systems of the most sparsely populated counties (that also usually are large in geographical size), like Pendleton and Pocahontas, need more to sustain themselves as a cohesive school system due to the challenges of widely scattered students and schools. They get funded based on how short they fall from a total student population of 1,400 in their schools even though they often have hundreds fewer than that.
The “1,400 floor” of support, originally crafted by then-State Senator Walt Helmick and current Pendleton County Schools Treasurer J. P. Mowery, for those counties, remains vital. No alternative exists to educating children in those counties should those school systems lose cohesion due to underpopulation.
Officials fear overhead costs would overwhelm these school systems if populations sink below a certain point. Almost every county faces challenges to their traditional systems from shrinking student populations resulting more in recent years from lower birth rates (a Western Civilization wide phenomenon, not just West Virginia) than outmigration. This has forced painful choices in many fields, but especially in terms of keeping outlying, yet sparsely populated, schools open to serve those communities.
Even those schools not in the 1,400 floor tier of counties face difficult budgetary decisions and have concerns about the future.
Some, like Kala Dyck from Jackson County’s Pathfinder Institute, have expressed the need for more cooperation and less antagonism between traditional systems and their alternative counterparts, which include charter schools, microschools, education cooperatives, and homeschooling families. The hope of those sharing that mindset is that together, public and other systems could work in concert to achieve the same goals in different ways without the alternative system being constrained by the same rules and regulations that sometimes hamstring traditional public education. Another hope from some is that the State Legislature start to remove some of the regulations that tie the hands of traditional public schools and school systems so that they could offer more of the alternatives pioneered by non public education.
Growth in the HOPE Scholarship program has come through both greater awareness and also greater opportunities.
First, the HOPE Scholarship Board adopted a more user-friendly process of distributing earned awards to recipients. Funds go to recipients twice a year, on August 15 and January 15. Quarterly application windows ensure that a family or guardian will get support, but that is reduced if applied for after the start of the school year, depending on when the application is received.
Another change targeted military families participating in the program. As the annual report states, this “policy allows children of military service members who are required to temporarily relocate into another state to participate in the program during their relocation and to remain HOPE Scholarship eligible when they return to West Virginia.”
Coming up in the 2026-27 school year “eligibility will expand to include all students who are eligible to be enrolled in a West Virginia public school.” Previously, students after the kindergarten grade had to spend some time in a traditional public school. Those entering the kindergarten year, however, merely must show eligibility and not time spent in the state public school.
Except in very rare and specified cases, HOPE Scholarship funds do not go directly to parents or guardians. As the annual report states, “families spend their Hope Scholarship money through the Hope Scholarship online portal with participating schools, education service providers, and vendors for qualifying educational expenses.
HOPE Scholarship money can be spent on services provided by a traditional public school, including extracurricular activities, tuition and fees for non public education providers, tutoring, educational services and therapies, fees for different examinations, academic supplies, and other qualifying needs.
Academic progress gets measured in three ways, through attendance confirmation by the non public school, a portfolio review by a certified teacher, and by nationally normed achievement test results.
Student numbers by county vary considerably. Kanawha County has just under 1,300 students receiving support, while McDowell has only six. Other county numbers include Pendleton with nine, Hardy with 18, and Harrison with 530.
Most recipients, by almost 70 percent, attend a non public school while almost all of the remainder learn under an individualized educational plan. By a slim amount of about one percent, female students participate more than males.
When looking at the race breakdown of students receiving support, minorities participate in the HOPE Scholarship program in numbers outstripping their population percentages statewide.
Students of different Spanish backgrounds make up 3.11 percent of recipients, but are 2.2 percent of the state population. Black students form 4.63 percent of HOPE Scholarship recipients, despite being 3.8 percent of the overall population.
About 89 percent of HOPE Scholarship students are white, compared to the state population percentage of 92.8 percent. No research has been done on why minority student numbers using the HOPE Scholarship are larger in terms of relative percentages to population than white students. From the 2022 to 23 school year, the percentage of Spanish background HOPE students was 2.02 and black students 4.37. Additionally, the number of white student percentages in HOPE declined by over two percent since its inception. This data indicates that the dynamic existed from the beginning of the program.
In terms of distribution by academic grade, the charting resembles an upside-down staircase.
Kindergarteners make up just under 1,900 participants. Only 133 high school seniors receive the scholarship.
