By: Steven Allen Adams
For: The Parkersburg News and Sentinel
Charleston – Gov. Patrick Morrisey said Monday that he plans to turn his focus between now and the next legislative session to working with lawmakers and education officials on fixing the troubled school aid formula.
Speaking during a press conference Monday, Morrisey said “without a doubt” he was willing to work on school aid formula reforms and reducing the number of regulations hindering public education in West Virginia.
“We have a chance to actually determine which (regulations) are going to require legislative changes, which ones are going to require the other regulatory changes, but without a doubt, we know that the school aid formula has not really been looked at in a very long time,” Morrisey said. “The answer is absolutely yes.”
Last week, West Virginia Board of Education President Paul Hardesty, State Superintendent of Schools Michele Blatt, and officials with the Department of Education called for the help of the governor and the Legislature in addressing the school aid formula, which has not seen a full-scale overhaul in decades.
Hardesty said the seven-step formula, which determines how much general revenue fund dollars go to the state’s 55 county school systems, was not keeping up with decades of declining enrollment and recent cost increases for educating special education students.
“I think we’re going to see some of our 55 business units run the risk of financial insolvency at some point in time here in the near future,” he said. “This can’t continue.”
According to a RAND Corporation study commissioned by the Legislature and released prior to the 2026 legislative session, while overall state education spending is near the national average, the system fails to adequately account for the higher costs associated with low-income students and those with disabilities.
According to the department, special education numbers increased as a percentage of the total student population from 20% to more than 25% over a 10-year period, creating a $224 million deficit in special education funding. Morrisey said this information was brought to his attention after his proposal for the fiscal year 2027 general revenue budget was crafted, and weeks into the start of the 2026 legislative session.
“This time, we have the ability to at least engage more thoughtfully on it,” Morrisey said. “I know the school board came to us right at the time after we had effectively created the budget last year.”
According to this year’s October headcount report, which is used by county school systems to develop budgets for the following school year and used to determine how much school aid formula money goes to counties, there were 234,957 students enrolled in the state’s 55 county school systems, a 2.52% decrease from fall enrollment this time last school year of 241,024 and a 15.32% decrease from the 277,452 fall enrollment number in 2015.
Since the October headcount report was released, county school systems have seen an additional reduction of approximately 5,000 students as of the end of the 2025-26 school year. Hardesty and state education officials also said that counties have already closed all the schools included in their 10-year Comprehensive Education Facilities Plans (CEFP) six years in, but an additional 10-20 schools could be closed over the next two years due to declining enrollments and cost-cutting measures.
Morrisey said the school aid formula must be re-tooled in order to ensure more state tax dollars get to the classrooms. The school aid formula was born out of a 1982 decision by former Ohio County Circuit Court Judge Arthur Recht after a parent brought a class action lawsuit against Lincoln County Schools arguing that poorer rural counties were being disadvantaged over larger, wealthier counties.
“It’s obviously a formula that’s been around for a long, long time. That represented a different West Virginia, at least from a population perspective,” Morrisey said. “It’s a complex issue because we have different parts of our state that are growing in population. You look at the Eastern Panhandle … as we’re watching money going in for building out of new schools out there. But then you have other counties where population has been in a rapid decline. So, we have to tackle that directly.”
Morrisey said it was also important to address the laws governing the state’s public school system with chapters 18 and 18a of State Code and eliminate regulatory burdens that take money out of classrooms and into county board of education offices.
“Actually, we’ve had a lot of success on the regulatory side. There’s always room for improvement, but that was always the goal, so this is important,” Morrisey said. “Most certainly, the regulations add to the costs. So, when we want to look at money and resources, we have to look at all issues, including some of the needless costs … I still think there’s administrative bloat that can be cut, and we want to work to do that.”
See more at: The Parkersburg News and Sentinel, here
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