CHARLESTON – West Virginia Treasurer Riley Moore has announced the first Hope Scholarship payments have been made to student accounts and can be used to pay for authorized educational services.
“This is a great day for school choice in West Virginia,” said Moore, who also chairs the Hope Scholarship Board. “After a tumultuous year of uncertainties and obstacles, families are finally able to put the Hope Scholarship to work for their children.”
The Hope Scholarship Program initially launched for applications last March and was scheduled to issue its first payments in August. But, an injunction from a Kanawha Circuit Court judge in July halted all activity with the program, leaving the almost 3,000 families that had been awarded the scholarship in limbo.
In October, the state Supreme Court lifted that injunction and ruled the program was constitutional, saying the Kanawha court had “abused its discretion.”
The Hope Scholarship Board then met to pass emergency rules to ensure families could then receive the appropriate amount of funds to which they were entitled for the full academic year.
“We have done our best to ensure all families enrolled in the program are made whole and receive the funds they deserve,” Moore said. “I know the injunction and the uncertainty it caused created a tremendous hardship on families, and we appreciate the patience they have displayed as we continue to work through the litany of issues it produced.
“Now that the state Supreme Court has fully upheld this program, we look forward to helping students and their families take full advantage of this program and its benefits for the remainder of this academic year and the school year to come.”
For the January 13 payments, Moore’s office said 1,610 students received the full-year scholarship amount of $4,298.60. Another 187 students received prorated payments of varying amounts, depending on when the student transitioned from a public to nonpublic education environment. The funds are available for use in the program’s Education Market Assistant online portal.
In addition, there are 466 student accounts still pending payments. Treasury staff is working to manually reconcile these on a case-by-case basis. Another 619 accounts did not have payments issued because the families have not yet responded to the questionnaires updating their child’s status following the injunction period.
Moore’s office asks families that still intend to use their child’s awarded Hope Scholarship for the current academic year and did not receive a payment or did not respond to their updated status survey to contact Hope Scholarship staff at hopescholarshipwv@wvsto.com. Families are asked to include their child’s WVEIS ID number so staff can begin processing that account.
Parents who will want to request reimbursements for qualifying education expenses incurred during the injunction period, that reimbursement module is expected to launch in the Education Market Assistant portal later this month.
The application period to use the Hope Scholarship for the upcoming 2023-2024 school year will open for new applicants on March 1. Current Hope Scholarship recipients will be able to begin applying to renew their scholarship February 15.