News from the South - West Virginia News Feed
Rapidly expanding school voucher programs pinch state budgets
by Kevin Hardy, West Virginia Watch
May 21, 2025
In submitting her updated budget proposal in March, Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs lamented the rising costs of the state’s school vouchers program that directs public dollars to pay private school tuition.
Characterizing vouchers as an “entitlement program,” Hobbs said the state could spend more than $1 billion subsidizing private education in the upcoming fiscal year. The Democratic governor said those expenses could crowd out other budget priorities, including disability programs and pay raises for firefighters and state troopers.
It’s a dilemma that some budget experts fear will become more common nationwide as the costs of school choice measures mount across the states, reaching billions of dollars each year.
“School vouchers are increasingly eating up state budgets in a way that I don’t think is sustainable long term,” said Whitney Tucker, director of state fiscal policy research at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a think tank that advocates for left-leaning tax policies.
Vouchers and scholarship programs, which use taxpayer money to cover private school tuition, are part of the wider school choice movement that also includes charter schools and other alternatives to public schools.
Opponents have long warned about vouchers draining resources from public education as students move from public schools to private ones. But research into several programs has shown many voucher recipients already were enrolled in private schools. That means universal vouchers could drive up costs by creating two parallel education systems — both funded by taxpayers.
School vouchers are increasingly eating up state budgets in a way that I don’t think is sustainable long term.
– Whitney Tucker, director of state fiscal policy research at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities
In Arizona, state officials reported most private school students receiving vouchers in the first two years of the expanded program were not previously enrolled in public schools. In fiscal year 2024, more than half the state’s 75,000 voucher recipients were previously enrolled in private schools or were being homeschooled.
“Vouchers don’t shift costs — they add costs,” Joshua Cowen, a professor of education policy at Michigan State University who studies the issue, recently told Stateline. “Most voucher recipients were already in private schools, meaning states are paying for education they previously didn’t have to fund.”
Voucher proponents, though, say those figures can be misleading. Arizona, like other states with recent expansions, previously had more modest voucher programs. So some kids who were already enrolled in private schools could have already been receiving state subsidies.
In addition to increasing competition, supporters say the programs can actually save taxpayer dollars by delivering education at a lower overall cost than traditional public schools.
One thing is certain: With a record number of students receiving subsidies to attend private schools, vouchers are quickly creating budget concerns for some state leaders.
The rising costs of school choice measures come after years of deep cuts to income taxes in many states, leaving them with less money to spend. An end of pandemic-era aid and potential looming cuts to federal support also have created widespread uncertainty about state budgets.
Skyrocketing Hope Scholarship price tag, now around $100M, a concern for WV lawmakers making budget
“We’re seeing a number of things that are creating a sort of perfect storm from a fiscal perspective in the states,” said Tucker, of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
Last year, Arizona leaders waded through an estimated $1.3 billion budget shortfall. Budget experts said the voucher program was responsible for hundreds of millions of that deficit.
A new universal voucher program in Texas is expected to cost $1 billion over its next two-year budget cycle — a figure that could balloon to nearly $5 billion by 2030, according to a legislative fiscal note.
Earlier this year, Wyoming Republican Gov. Mark Gordon signed a bill expanding the state’s voucher program. But last week, he acknowledged his own “substantial concerns” about the state’s ability to fund vouchers and its public education obligations under the constitution.
“I think the legislature’s got a very tall task to understand how they’re going to be able to fund all of these things,” he said in an interview with WyoFile.
Voucher proponents, who have been active at the state level for years, are gaining new momentum with support from President Donald Trump and congressional Republicans.
In January, Trump ordered federal agencies to allow states, tribes and military families to access federal money for private K-12 education through education savings accounts, voucher programs or tax credits.
Last week, Republicans on the House Ways and Means Committee voted in favor of making $20 billion available over the next four years for a federal school voucher program. Part of broader work on a bill to extend Trump’s 2017 tax cuts, the measure would need a simple majority in the House and the Senate to pass.
Hope Scholarship’s accelerating price tag sparks debate in WV House, $97M in funding approved
Martin Lueken, the director of the Fiscal Research and Education Center at EdChoice, a nonprofit that advocates for school choice measures, argues school choice measures can actually deliver savings to taxpayers.
Lueken said vouchers are not to blame for state budget woes. He said public school systems for years have increased spending faster than inflation. And he noted that school choice measures make up a small share of overall state spending — nationally about 0.3% of total state expenditures in states with school choice, he said.
“Public schooling remains one of the largest line items in state budgets,” he said in an interview. “They are still the dominant provider of K-12 education, and certainly looking at the education pie, they still receive the lion’s share.
“It’s not a choice problem. I would say that it’s a problem with the status quo and the public school system,” he said.
Washington, D.C., and 35 states offer some school choice programs, according to EdChoice. That includes 18 states with voucher programs so expansive that virtually all students can participate regardless of income.
But Lueken said framing vouchers as a new entitlement program is misleading. That’s because all students, even the wealthiest, have always been entitled to a public education — whether they’ve chosen to attend free public schools or private ones that charge tuition.
“At the end of the day, the thing that matters most above dollars are students and families,” he said. “Research is clear that competition works. Public schools have responded in very positive ways when they are faced with increased competitive pressure from choice programs.”
Public school advocates say funding both private and public schools is untenable.
In Wisconsin, Republican lawmakers are considering a major voucher expansion that would alter the funding structure for vouchers, potentially putting more strain on the state’s general fund.
The state spent about $629 million on its four voucher programs during the 2024-2025 school year, according to the Wisconsin Association of School Business Officials, which represents employees in school district finance, human resources and leadership.
The association warns proposed legislation could exacerbate problems with the “unaffordable parallel school systems” in place now by shifting more private schooling costs from parents of those students to state taxpayers at large.
Such expansion “could create the conditions for even greater funding challenges for Wisconsin’s traditional public schools and the state budget as a whole,” the association’s research director wrote in a paper on the issue.
In Arizona, Hobbs originally sought to eliminate the universal voucher program — a nonstarter in the Republican-controlled legislature. She has since proposed shrinking the program by placing income limits that would disqualify the state’s wealthiest families.
That idea also faced Republican opposition.
Legislators are now pushing to enshrine access to vouchers in the state constitution.
Marisol Garcia, president of the Arizona Education Association, the state’s 20,000-member teachers union, noted that vouchers and public education funds are both sourced from the general fund.
“So it almost immediately started to impact public services,” she said of the universal voucher program.
While the union says vouchers have led to cutbacks of important resources such as counselors in public schools, Garcia said the sweeping program also affects the state’s ability to fund other services like housing, transportation and health care.
“Every budget cycle becomes where can we cut in order to essentially feed this out-of-control program?” she said.
Stateline reporter Kevin Hardy can be reached at khardy@stateline.org.
GET THE MORNING HEADLINES.
West Virginia Watch is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. West Virginia Watch maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Leann Ray for questions: info@westvirginiawatch.com.
The post Rapidly expanding school voucher programs pinch state budgets appeared first on westvirginiawatch.com
Note: The following A.I. based commentary is not part of the original article, reproduced above, but is offered in the hopes that it will promote greater media literacy and critical thinking, by making any potential bias more visible to the reader –Staff Editor.
Political Bias Rating: Center-Left
This content provides a detailed examination of the growing costs and budgetary challenges posed by school voucher programs, highlighting concerns chiefly raised by Democratic officials, public school advocates, and left-leaning policy experts like those at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. The article gives substantial weight to the fiscal strains vouchers impose on public education funding, a topic commonly emphasized by progressive and center-left commentators. Although it includes perspectives from voucher proponents and Republican lawmakers, these views are typically framed in contrast to the concerns about budget sustainability and public school impact, which dominate the narrative. Overall, the piece leans slightly left of center by focusing more on the critiques of voucher programs and their implications for public education funding.
News from the South - West Virginia News Feed
Despite research, WV counties refuse to fund harm reduction with opioid funds
by Ty McClung, West Virginia University, West Virginia Watch
July 10, 2025
On a warm summer day in late May, about 100 people are waiting for their turn to go inside the Neighborhood S.H.O.P., located in the annex of Bream Memorial Presbyterian Church on the West Side of Charleston, West Virginia.
Inside the S.H.O.P. — which stands for Showers Healthcare Outreach Program — they will find resources like naloxone, clothing, first-aid supplies, food, showers and people offering services from rental to legal assistance. Director Derek Hudson says the no-barrier organization aids almost 2,000 people a month.
“The whole goal is to have people come in, be heard and know that at least someone is trying to help them,” Hudson said.
The kind of help the S.H.O.P. provides, broadly speaking, is harm reduction.
“Harm reduction for us focuses on meeting people where they are and empowering them with the tools to help prevent negative health outcomes from substance use,” Hudson explained. “Harm reduction, simply put, saves lives.”
What they won’t find inside, however, is one of the most well-known forms of harm reduction: new syringes.
Syringe Service Programs are highly regulated in the state of West Virginia, and service providers say it makes it almost impossible to run one. But SSPs are associated with an approximately 50% reduction in HIV and HCV incidence, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. They also benefit communities and public safety by reducing needlestick injuries and overdose deaths.
Hudson’s S.H.O.P. has received about $80,000 in state opioid settlement funds from the West Virginia First Foundation specifically to create a re-entry program that will house people who are coming out of incarceration. It’s a program that will reduce recidivism and homelessness in the community, Hudson says, but it is not considered a harm reduction program.
Programs that provide more typical harm reduction in the form of practical strategies that reduce the negative consequences of drug use — which can include anything from free naloxone to wound care — are not receiving any of the tens of millions of dollars coming into state, county and city level government coffers in West Virginia from the 2021 global opioid lawsuit settlement agreement so far, according to an analysis by students from West Virginia University’s Reed School of Media of Freedom of Information Act responses from 50 of the state’s 55 counties. And without those funds, many of the people working to provide these services worry that disease transmission and overdose death rates will buck a national trend and rise in West Virginia once again.
The high cost of a crisis
The funds are the result of a global settlement, agreed to in federal court, of a class action lawsuit brought by states, counties and cities across the country against opioid distributors, manufacturers, pharmaceutical companies and others, in the wake of the country’s opioid epidemic.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more than 720,000 people died from an opioid overdose in the U.S. between 1999 and 2022. West Virginia saw its peak in 2022, when 1,335, or 75 out of every 100,000 people, died of an overdose.
West Virginia will receive about $980 million in total from the settlement agreement, split into payments over 18 years, with larger payments coming up front. The West Virginia First Foundation — a nonprofit created by the state Legislature — will control the spending of 72.5% of the funds, local governments 24.5%, and the West Virginia Attorney General’s Office 3%. A Memorandum of Understanding dictates what the money can be spent on, ranging from law enforcement, prevention education, treatment and recovery to harm reduction.
In 2023, more than $73.5 million of those funds were distributed to county officials in the state’s 55 counties. An analysis of FOIA responses by journalism students at West Virginia University’s Reed School of Media lacks information for five counties, but of the 50 others, Logan County received the highest distribution at $3,983,631, and Jefferson County received the least at $62,773.
Kanawha County, where the state’s capital Charleston is located, received just more than $3.9 million, and, according to County Commissioner Lance Wheeler, is focusing on funding recovery options. But Wheeler says they are also considering funding harm reduction organizations as well.
“This is something I strongly support,” Wheeler said. “We’re going to continue to do that, helping those who have a track record of success and those who are helping people who are struggling.”
The collapse of a program — and the fallout that followed
Harm reduction has a long, complicated history in Kanawha County and Charleston. With a population of 47,000, Charleston is the largest city in the state. It also had the highest overdose rate per capita in the entire country in 2022.
The city health department started a syringe service program in 2015, but was open for just three years before public and political pressure forced the city to shut it down. Then-mayor Danny Jones, a Republican, called the program a “mini-mall for junkies and drug dealers.”
The program’s closure in 2018, however, had dire consequences for public health. HIV and hepatitis rates skyrocketed, eventually requiring CDC officials to travel to Charleston in 2021 to help the city contain the outbreak.
Then-CDC HIV Prevention Chief Dr. Demetre Daskalakis called the outbreak “the most concerning HIV outbreak in the United States.”
The fight for evidence-based and person-first
Iris Sidikman, the harm reduction coordinator at the Women’s Health Center of West Virginia, said the reluctance to fund harm-reduction services has directly impacted organizations that go beyond providing syringe services.
“When you have a tool to give someone in a non-judgmental space, it can open a world of possibilities,” Sidikman said.
In 2024, the Women’s Health Center applied to the Kanawha County Commission for $250,000 in opioid settlement funds twice, first through an online application and again at a public commission meeting. The clinic intended to use some the funds to provide increased naloxone training and education, cover costs related to screening and treatment of HIV and Hepatitis C and to fund a portion of clinical and programmatic staff salaries for the Harm Reduction Program, Sidikman said. Their application was denied without explanation.
The Women’s Health Center also applied with Charleston City Council in August 2023 to create a syringe service program on Charleston’s West Side, but was denied due to fear of an “increase in drug use and crime.”
Research on harm reduction by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration has shown that these practices reduce disease transmission and overdose rates, and experts believe politicians should look at the numbers more often.
“What we want to do with data analysis… is to be able to produce the evidence to show to political power that these interventions are working and capable, they are saving many lives,” said RTI International Research and Public Health Analyst Barrett Montgomery.
SOAR WV, another grassroots, Charleston-based harm reduction group, works to promote the health, dignity and voices of individuals who are impacted by substance use disorders, according to its website. SOAR and other organizations picked up the task of providing new syringes until the state Legislature passed Senate Bill 334 in 2021, which included strict regulations for running a syringe service program, such as requiring a West Virginia state ID in order to participate.
The city of Charleston also passed stipulations requiring that each syringe be uniquely labeled for tracking purposes.
As of June 2025, West Virginia Health Right operates the only syringe-service program in Charleston, but according to one source, “doesn’t even begin to make a dent in the problem.”
The political appetite is lacking because of a lack of information around the subject, says Dr. Susan Margaret Murphy, president of the Drug Intervention Institute in Charleston.
“Unfortunately, we are in a political climate where I don’t think research and scientific knowledge necessarily pleads the case. So sometimes it’s got to be kind of a heart-on-the-sleeve storytelling type of approach,” she said.
Stigma and the struggle for support
In neighboring Boone County, Commissioner Brett Kuhn agreed.
The county currently does not have any harm reduction services, and, so far, its three elected commissioners have not spent any of their $2.9 million in opioid settlement funds to provide them.
“I think in a rural setting, you’re going to see more pushback than you would in more of an urban setting,” Kuhn said. “I think with the syringes, it’s like people think we’re subsidizing the drug use, whereas with naloxone the attitude is more like, ‘well, we’re trying to help somebody that’s in trouble.’ And really, if you look at it, in both cases, is there any real difference between the two?”
Kuhn says that informing the public about how harm reduction works and its benefits to the community is key to fighting pushback.
“You’ve got to get out ahead of the curve. You’ve got to get out there and get the information out,” Kuhn said. “I sometimes think we don’t do a good enough job of that.”
Kuhn said his county experienced the brunt of the nation’s opioid overdose epidemic firsthand. Its opioid mortality rate in 2023 was 82.0 per 100,000, the second-highest rate in West Virginia, according to the West Virginia Department of Health and Human Resources.
Instead of harm reduction programs, the county spent its funds on paying off its regional jail bill, supporting a food pantry, a county arrest record-keeping system, a rapid response vehicle for EMTs, and a 25-bed expansion at Hero House, a faith-based sober living home in Madison.
Kuhn and officials in other counties say the vague nature of the state’s MOU overviewing how the money can be spent puts the duty of interpretation on local officials. The county did not hold special community meetings or town halls to gather input on how to spend the funds.
But Kuhn says it’s rebuilding a sense of community that could help garner support for harm reduction services.
“I think it’s sometimes the attitude is ‘well, those people don’t want to help themselves,’” Kuhn said, “[but] if they don’t want to help themselves, then what do I need to do to try to help? And I think in a certain sense, we’ve lost that sense of community, that we’re all in this together.”
Kuhn hopes that can change in the future.
This story was published in partnership with West Virginia University’s Reed School of Media and Communications, with support from Scott Widmeyer.
GET THE MORNING HEADLINES.
West Virginia Watch is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. West Virginia Watch maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Leann Ray for questions: info@westvirginiawatch.com.
The post Despite research, WV counties refuse to fund harm reduction with opioid funds appeared first on westvirginiawatch.com
Note: The following A.I. based commentary is not part of the original article, reproduced above, but is offered in the hopes that it will promote greater media literacy and critical thinking, by making any potential bias more visible to the reader –Staff Editor.
Political Bias Rating: Center-Left
This article presents a sympathetic view toward harm reduction programs and critiques the regulatory and political barriers limiting their effectiveness in West Virginia. It highlights the public health consequences of shutting down syringe service programs and emphasizes scientific evidence supporting harm reduction. The tone favors evidence-based, compassionate approaches to drug policy and health crises, implicitly criticizing conservative political opposition, such as the cited Republican mayor’s negative framing of harm reduction efforts. However, it maintains a largely factual reporting style with multiple sourced statements and avoids overt partisan language, placing it in a center-left position focused on public health advocacy.
News from the South - West Virginia News Feed
Jay's Evening Weather for Tuesday 07/08/25
SUMMARY: Jay’s Evening Weather for Tuesday 07/08/25 reports showers in southern West Virginia this afternoon and evening, raising humidity and causing wet roads. Showers are mainly in western areas, including McDowell, Wyoming, and Tazewell counties, moving eastward. Dense fog may reduce morning visibility. Severe thunderstorms have been warned near Lynchburg, Virginia, with a disturbance expected Wednesday into Thursday, increasing thunderstorm intensity. The strongest storms will be east and southeast but may affect southern West Virginia. Main threats include damaging winds and flooding rains with over an inch possible, causing ponding. Temperatures will range in the 80s by day, 60s at night with scattered storms continuing through the week.
We’ve seen showers around the region this afternoon, and more are possible over the rest of the extended forecast.
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News from the South - West Virginia News Feed
Crews return to scene of house fire
SUMMARY: Fire crews are returning to the scene of a house fire that started just after midnight this morning along Township Road 1-72, off Route 7-75. Firefighters report the initial fire began around 12:30 a.m. Investigators are back on site today, searching for the fire’s cause. It remains unclear if anyone was hurt in the blaze. Meanwhile, an Arizona man has been charged with attempted murder in Dunbar following the incident, according to police. Fire crews continue to manage the situation as authorities conduct their investigation.
Crews return to scene of house fire.
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