Inside West Virginia Politics

What is the Hope Scholarship? In Segment 1, West Virginia’s Treasurer Riley Moore discusses the Hope Scholarship. According to Moore, the Hope Scholarship Program is an education savings account that allows parents to receive $4,600 per-pupil state funding already set aside for their children’s education onto an electronic, parent-controlled fund for educational expenses. Those expenses can include private school tuition, tutoring, credentialing, therapies, transportation and more. This program can also allow parents to take students out of traditional schooling and use that money to help home-school them. For years, the teachers’ unions in the state effectively fought and defeated bills for the program. They worry that it’s diverting public money from the public education system and will only hurt the public schools’ system by taking money away and putting it in the private school system. Moore says this money is from state funding, not federal funding. Teachers will not lose federal money in schools.“The [s