Last week, the House Finance Committee rolled out a bill that would cap Hope Scholarship recipients to $5,250 awards, break payments up from biannually to quarterly and tighten what the scholarship could be used for.
The reaction was immediate.
Gov. Patrick Morrisey publicly called out House Finance Chair Del. Vernon Criss, R-Wood, for not backing school choice.
“Tax cuts and school choice used to be page one of the Republican platform— guess House Finance Chair Vernon Criss hasn’t gotten that far,” the governor posted on the social platform X.
U.S. Rep. Riley Moore, R-W.Va., called on the Legislature to rethink the proposition.
Lines of homeschooling parents and children came to the Capitol to protest the proposal.
But legislators have repeatedly expressed concern about the ballooning price tag for the scholarship. The governor’s overall budget for Hope is $230 million in the 2027 budget year alone.
The total savings from the new House proposal would amount to only $20 million — less than half of a Senate proposal to increase funding for special education programs in the state.
The proposal will do little to contain the cost of the program expanding to all students in the upcoming school year.
The governor’s proposed budget fully funds the scholarship but uses surplus funds, which are unstable because they’re not guaranteed the next year, to balance other state needs. The Senate version of the budget pays for the scholarship wholly using the surplus funds.
House leadership hired the RAND Corporation to assess and make recommendations on public school funding, which mainly focused on providing additional funds to special education programs and students in poverty.
At the very beginning of the session, lawmakers heard a presentation from RAND recommending capping the Hope Scholarship based on income. The cost savings are is impossible to know, because the state does not collect data on the income of families using the voucher.
The idea for an award cap, rather than an income cap, came from the state’s Promise Scholarship, which pays up to $5,500 for in-state tuition for undergraduate students who attain a 3.0 GPA, according to Criss.
On Monday, the House Finance Committee room was packed with homeschooling families. Morrisey and his wife, Denise, sat on the bench that wraps around the committee’s conference table. West Virginia Americans For Prosperity director Jason Huffman leaned against a wall in the hallway.
“Our main concern is that it guts the program,” Huffman said.
Currently, the Hope Scholarship is tied to the school funding formula, based on the per-pupil expenditure once teachers’ wages and other public school costs are subtracted from it. Huffman said capping it to $5,250 freezes the amount families get, while educational costs continue to rise and make private education unattainable to scholarship recipients.
Inside the committee room, Criss called for a hearing on two dozen bills. Del. Evan Worrell, R-Cabell, himself a homeschooling parent, asked the chairman if the Hope bill would be heard.
“We’re still having discussions about the markup and passage of the bill,” Criss said. “So that bill will not be taken up today.”
Within a couple of minutes, the Morriseys left the room. Then the homeschooling families left. Some reconvened in the office of Del. Kathy Hess-Crouse, R-Putnam, a vocal supporter of homeschooling.
Tabitha Simmons, a mother of four, said the proposed change to quarterly payments would make it harder for her family to get educational curricula.
“The tools that they would need will cost well over $1,000. If they do quarterly, it’s going to be harder for parents to fund their classrooms for their children at the beginning of the year, and then we’re missing instructional days,” Simmons said.
But Criss said the thinking behind the bill is to keep the program costs from spiraling out of control.
“I don’t want to be able to have to come back here in the next couple years — ‘boys, we’ve run out of money on Hope Scholarship, and we’re going to have a tax increase just to pay for Hope,’” Criss said.
Huffman said he doesn’t believe the costs are getting out of control. However, the cost of the program has risen from $9.2 million during the 2022-2023 school year, the first year of the program, to nearly a quarter of a billion dollars projected for 2026-2027.
The scholarship award amount this year is $5,267 per student.
Tamaya Browder, education policy fellow for the West Virginia Center on Budget and Policy, said the proposed changes were a good start.
She said, “There is a lot more that needs to be done to rein in this program.”