West Virginia Board of Education President Paul Hardesty gave a surprising message to public schools Wednesday: Adapt to school choice or face a continued decline in enrollment.
“You might not like what I have to say, but I don’t really care. School choice is here to stay,” Hardesty said during the board’s June meeting.
“Our 55 county superintendents and boards need to understand that we are one of the school choice options. We need to make our option more accommodating to parents and children.”
The comments were a surprise coming from a man who, eight months earlier, accused the Republican-led Legislature of creating school choice in order to “bankrupt the school system so that change can occur.”
“We try every day to make it more competitive,” he said at an October state board meeting. “But you’ve got to level the playing field. This assault on public education … has got to stop.”
Now Hardesty is asking schools to help identify policies that need to change.
His remarks came after the board granted a waiver allowing a family to enroll its 5-year-old in pre-K instead of kindergarten. A Republican lawmaker brought the need for the change to his attention, WV News reported.
Hardesty ordered a review by the state Department of Education to eliminate outdated rules. This is being done with an eye toward making schools more competitive with alternatives such as private schools, Christian schools, microschools and homeschooling, which are growing in the state.
In October, Hardesty blamed public school troubles on more than 1,300 pages of regulations passed by the Legislature, compared with just a few pages governing private schools and homeschoolers.
Now he says that as long as Gov. Patrick Morrissey, a Republican, and the Republican-led Legislature support school choice, public schools need to “change the image, change the mindset and the way we’ve always done business in the past.”
Public school enrollment has fallen 15% since 2015 to 235,000, WV News reported, and the number of schools in the largely rural state declined 3% in the last year alone. In May, the state board approved the closure of 15 more schools, marking a further 2.4% decrease.
But more than 24,000 students are homeschooled and more than 14,000 participate in the Hope Scholarship Program, an Educational Savings Account that began in 2022 and becomes fully universal this year, meaning every student who wants a scholarship can receive one. Another 3,400 students attend charter schools.
Hardesty, a former Democratic lawmaker, reiterated his point that public schools have to change.
“We are competing for enrollment, whether we want to believe it or not. And the only way we’re going to get more enrollment is to be more accommodating, more receptive and more accessible to parents and students.”
Corey DeAngelis, a research fellow at The Heritage Foundation and senior fellow at Americans for Fair Treatment, said Hardesty’s change is “exactly what happens when parents finally get real options – systems that used to dismiss choice suddenly realize they have to compete.”
“Competition works,” he told The Lion. “Public schools are improving because they have to, and kids are the biggest winners.”
