Hope Scholarship Report Shows Growth In Enrollment, Cost

The latest annual report on West Virginia’s school voucher program shows it continues to grow in popularity – and cost.  

The 2025-2026 Hope Scholarship Annual Report was released Monday by State Treasurer Larry Pack, who serves as Chairman of the Hope Scholarship Board. The Hope Scholarship program provides financial assistance to qualifying families to be used for private school tuition, homeschool curriculum and other approved educational expenses. 

The report shows that $68,549,544.10 was spent in the past school year through the Hope Scholarship, up from $43,766,093.47 the previous year. $75,023,367.76 in funds were transferred to student accounts, but $11,289,646.51 remained unspent. 

In total 14,486 students received some level of scholarship, with recipients of the full scholarship receiving $5,267.38 each, up from $4,921.39 the previous year. Students whose applications were received after the June deadline received prorated amounts of as much as 75%, sliding down to 25% depending on when their application was received. 

As the scholarship amount continues to rise, disbursements are now $5,435.62 per student. 

The majority of Hope Scholarship funds, $45,513,562.04, went to nonpublic schools, such as private religious schools. That is up from $31,921,518.22 last year.  Each of the top 10 recipients received over $1 million in payments from the program, with top recipient Faith Christian Academy in Martinsburg receiving more than $1.5 million. 

Almost 95% of nonpublic school payments were made in West Virginia, but more than $2.5 million was spent on schools in border states like Maryland and Virginia. More than $200,000 went to schools in seven states further afield including Washington and California.  

The next largest payment category was $12,817,916.98 in payments to suppliers and orders placed through the Hope Scholarship Program’s open marketplace TheoPay application. The majority of those payments, more than $$9,419,040.50, went to purchases made via Amazon.  

The report also breaks down recipient demographics, with 9,372 – almost two thirds – of all recipients of the Hope Scholarship being elementary school students in Kindergarten through 5^th grades.  

The report also shows that the scholarship was most used in high population counties like Kanawha, Berkeley and Jefferson. One of the claims made in a lawsuit filed in September by 10 parents in Mingo County was that they have less opportunity to use Hope Scholarship funds if they chose to, as no participating private schools “sits within a reasonable commute of their homes. They bear the fiscal consequences of the program without practical access to the choice the program was enacted to provide.”   

The lawsuit sought to stop “further disbursement of Hope Scholarship funds to new, first-time applicants who became eligible only by operation of the 2026-2027 universal eligibility expansion,” but appears to have been dismissed shortly after its filing. 

Another criticism made in the suit and more broadly of the Hope Scholarship, is the inability of special needs students to use the funds as private educators are not required to accept special needs students. Just 8.4% of recipients reported that their student classified as a student with special needs; 89.7% of recipients answered “No.”    

Last year was the final year where Hope Scholarship applicants were required to be enrolled in public school for at least 45 days. That requirement has been dropped as of the current 2026-2027 school year, and existing private school and traditional homeschool students who were not previously eligible for the program are eligible to apply.  

Pack’s office has previously estimated the program’s cost after universal enrollment will be around $245 million. The state legislature appropriated more than $270 million for the program in the most recent state budget.  

According to the report, the program had already received more than 25,000 approved applications for the 2026-2027 school year by late August, nearly doubling participation from the previous year. 

Read the full report below: