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School disciplinary data has remained largely consistent according to an annual report presented to the Legislative Oversight Commission on Education Accountability.
Drew McClanahan, Legislative and Policy officer for the West Virginia Department of Education (WVDE) noted that despite being a small percentage of the overall student population, students facing extreme adversity outside the classroom were overrepresented in the data.
80% of homeless students were cited for disciplinary issues last year.
“Foster care students and the concerns and the dire straits maybe that they’re going through,” McClanahan said. “I think it certainly begs the question of what might a student be going through that then relates to the behavior that they have inside of a classroom?”
Of the 474 students that were expelled from West Virginia’s public schools during the 2025-2026 school year, 75% were categorized as having low socioeconomic status or having less access to financial, educational, social, and health resources.
Passed in 2023, House Bill 2890 allows a teacher to remove a disruptive student to a different environment to protect the integrity of the class for the duration of that class period. Two years later in 2025, Senate Bill 199 extended similar allowances to kindergarten through sixth-grade teachers to remove students from their classroom for extreme disciplinary issues, but also requires those students be assessed and placed on a behavioral plan.
“What we can see is last year there were 2,753 of those incidents of students written up for a situation of disruptive conduct pursuant to the parameters of House Bill 2890,” McClanahan said. “Students that were written up pursuant to Senate Bill 199, we had 447 of those incidents with 255 students referred.”
McClanahan said the WVDE had put in a lot of work over the past year to ensure compliance with SB 199’s particular requirements, including the funding and support of 10 elementary alternative education pilots throughout the state in Berkeley, Boone, Clay, Hancock, Marion, Mercer, Monongalia, Raleigh, Roane, and Wyoming counties.