WV House spent $114,000 on a school finance study and did not implement the recommendations this year

After several districts reported a school finance crisis, largely due to West Virginia’s failing population, the House of Representatives commissioned a study to examine how to improve the state’s school funding strategy.

Between 2025 and this year, the House spent $114,000 on it study Analysts at the RAND Corporation presented their findings to lawmakers in January. The report included recommendations such as West Virginia increasing its overall public education budget and providing more funding to districts larger proportions of special education teachers and install some guard rails the Hope Scholarship.

Lawmakers did not implement these changes by the end of the session.

“What seemed to worry us after the RAND report was made available to us was that we kept getting into trouble because of our differences in different districts,” Del said. Mike Hornby, R-Berkeley, who helped write the report. “There are 55 different counties and 55 different ways of doing things. And it seemed to me that we got a little too far into the weeds and we didn’t look at it from 50,000 feet.”

Del. Mike Pushkin, D-Kanawha, said the RAND report “will be placed on a shelf next to a long list of blue-ribbon reports that the Republican supermajority has ignored.”

“I’m very disappointed, but not at all shocked that they ignored it,” said Pushkin, who serves on the House Education Committee. “We keep hearing about schools or communities losing their schools, and we have done nothing to address this problem. For smaller communities to lose their school, it is devastating and it should have been a top priority. That simply wasn’t the case. Instead, we put $300 million into vouchers.”

The RAND report said the state’s education system is struggling to provide adequate educational services to its students.

West Virginia uses a seven-step formula to determine how much state funding goes to the county’s school systems based on factors such as the number of students enrolled.

Many school districts are struggling with dire financial situations as student enrollment declines, largely due to the state’s overall population decline. Dwindling federal funding to combat the COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated financial difficulties. Additionally, approximately 15,000 students have left public schools to utilize the Hope Scholarship for private school tuition, homeschooling and more.

According to the state Department of Education, West Virginia schools have 2,685.92 school staff positions above the formula and the state has experienced another year widespread cuts to teachers and staff. Counties will employ local resources where available to avoid job losses.

“While overall spending is slightly above the national average, West Virginia schools educate a large share of students in key populations that previous research has shown to be associated with higher costs and academic disadvantage,” the RAND report says.

Senate Education Chairwoman Amy Grady, R-Mason, said the report was not necessary; School leaders, principals and teachers could tell lawmakers exactly what is needed.

“I think you can get more out of these conversations than reports from an outside agency that just looks in,” she said. “I think it was a waste of money. I know the intent was probably really great, but I think it was a waste of money when we have the resources to tell us what’s needed.”

Special education services put schools in debt

Most legislators Bills to change school funding failed to get a full vote in the House or Senate Legislative period ended last month. Many of the bills were initiated by Grady.

“If we had believed that we could get everything that the RAND report suggested, I think it would have cost us about $300 million (plus),” Hornby said. “The problem was that it was taken away from some districts and given to others…We don’t want to take away funding from any district.”

West Virginia ranks near the bottom of all states in the amount of special education funding, even though its special education enrollment rate is the fifth highest in the country.

The report recommended changing the funding formula to distribute more resources to districts that serve a higher proportion of special education students or low-income families.

Several school districts have reported that they are incurring millions of dollars in debt due to the provision of special education services that are required at the state and federal levels.

A measure, a bill that would have provided an additional $8 million for Special Education in 2027 failed to complete legislative action on the final night of the session despite passage by the House and Senate.

“They couldn’t achieve anything…It almost seems like a concerted effort to destroy our public education system,” Pushkin said.

The RAND report found that Mississippi, Louisiana and Tennessee saw improvements in academic outcomes over the past decade due to several changes, including updating their school funding formulas “for fair distribution of funding.”

The analysts behind the RAND report also recommended West Virginia make changes to its comprehensive school voucher program, the Hope Scholarship. Legislature committed nearly $300 million to work towards this program in this legislative period.

The program is now available for the first time since the program launched in 2021 for all K-12 students. The RAND report recommended this expansion on the grounds that “such an expansion would inefficiently subsidize private school tuition for many families who would have chosen private schools anyway.”

“Overall, the sudden expansion of the Hope program to become widely available is without “Barriers to eligibility could result in significant new cost burdens for the state,” the report said. “The additional resources expended by expanding eligibility are likely to be less efficient in increasing the net educational benefits students receive than the current version of the Hope program or the use of state resources directly to provide public education services.”

Hornby said lawmakers will continue to employ the RAND report when planning future adjustments to the school funding formula. He said the House plans to engage the Senate in school funding discussions before the next session in 2027.

“I don’t think we ignored the RAND report. I do think we took a lot of those aspects into account. I just don’t think we believed, as we did in the Education Committee, that we could do everything through funding, and the budget had been passed earlier in the session, so we pushed it back a year so we could make those adjustments,” he said. “I think you’ll see something much more substantial in the next session.”