Hope enrollment reaches 26,000 students while 70 public schools close
Three billionaire-backed political action committees spent more than $145,000 to help a 23-year-old gas station cashier defeat West Virginia Del. Vernon Criss in the 2026 Republican primary, according to a ProPublica and Mountain State Spotlight investigation. Criss, the House Finance Committee chairperson, had proposed capping the Hope Scholarship, the nation’s first educational savings account program without income requirements.
The money and organizing behind the demise of the bill, as well as the targeting of Criss, can be traced to “school choice” advocates at the local and national levels and their ability to spend huge sums to have their way, ProPublica and Mountain State Spotlight reported. West Virginia has been part of a nationwide push, partially funded by billionaire-backed political groups, to use taxpayer dollars to fund private schools. In West Virginia, Arkansas and Texas, proponents have been eager to challenge anyone who got in the way, including fellow Republicans who voiced concerns. Basic guardrails or efforts to cap spending have been met with intense resistance.
Five days after Criss proposed limiting the Hope Scholarship, parents and organizers packed the state Capitol in Charleston. Children in winter jackets, holding signs and their homework, clogged the hallways outside the House Finance Committee room. Parents and media filed in, taking seats along the narrow benches lining the committee room’s walls. Kids lay on the floor. A delegate asked if the Hope Scholarship bill would be discussed. When Criss said no, the parents and their kids stood up and filed out. In a Facebook post, parent advocate Katie Switzer warned that “the bill takes away 19,000 children’s access to online education, tutoring, private schools across state borders, and many other beneficial academic programs.” Jason Huffman, the West Virginia director of Americans for Prosperity, took to radio and social media to describe what he called an existential threat to the program. At a Republican caucus meeting — the party holds 91 of the chamber’s 100 seats — Criss said he could not muster the votes. A separate bill to address public school funding, which had cleared the Education Committee, died entirely.
Criss’s proposal would have capped the Hope Scholarship award at a little more than $5,000 a year. He said his intent was to prolong the program for the long run, not kill it. “The state and its lawmakers needed ‘to face the music,’” Criss said later. Looking back, he described the Hope Scholarship as a “giveaway program” and blamed political forces for stirring up opposition. Huffman countered that capping the award would erode families’ purchasing power as inflation rose.
The Hope Scholarship has grown significantly since its creation. Criss voted to establish it five years before his proposal — in 2021 — making the program the nation’s first educational savings account with no income requirements. Eleven other states have since passed similar legislation. In its first year, the program cost the state $9 million. As 2026 began, with the program set to expand, estimates said it could cost $200 million or more a year. Criss was concerned that unchecked growth of the program, coupled with a spree of tax cuts, could put the state budget into a tailspin, according to ProPublica and Mountain State Spotlight. By the 2026-27 school year, the program had expanded to open to any West Virginia student, including those already enrolled in private school or homeschooled. Estimates leading up to the legislative session ranged from $230 million to more than $300 million. The program’s costs for the year are still being tallied but are currently projected at an unprecedented $150 million. Today, 26,000 students participate — more than the enrollment of the state’s largest public school district.
West Virginia’s public school system has been losing students and closing buildings alongside that growth. Since 2019, 70 public schools have closed across the state, with the system losing more than 30,000 students. Up to 20 more schools could close by the end of this school year. During the same legislative session in which lawmakers passed emergency legislation to keep one school district open, there was little public drama, according to ProPublica and Mountain State Spotlight.
The political organizing behind the Hope Scholarship dates to 2021, when Huffman and other outside advocates helped draft the bill. One goal, Huffman said, was to create a model voucher program that other states could replicate. While other states had already passed voucher-style programs, they hadn’t made them open to all residents regardless of income. Cardinal Institute, a West Virginia conservative think tank founded in 2015, made public funding for private schooling one of its first policy planks. To support the Hope legislation, Cardinal’s leaders distributed research, published columns in newspapers and linked up with other groups, like Americans for Prosperity and the Institute for Justice, which litigates libertarian causes, to push the issue. They also found allies in parents who wanted the financial flexibility to send their children to private schools or teach them at home or in small clusters of like-minded families. Over the last decade, Cardinal has received significant donations from organizations that also received funding from Koch entities and Yass.
Switzer, a mother of six, became one of Cardinal’s most reliable advocates. She had started looking into schooling options after her second child was diagnosed with a learning disability. “I just felt like this doesn’t feel good to send my nonverbal child to a school that you know isn’t really collaborative, and I don’t know what’s going on when she’s there because she can’t tell me when she gets home,” she said. Her experience made her a proponent of alternatives to public school. She sat in on a video call presentation featuring state Sen. Patricia Rucker, took to Facebook to promote the program, and later signed on as a plaintiff when the Hope Scholarship faced a legal challenge from parents who argued it would undermine public school funding.
The Institute for Justice, which litigates libertarian causes, represented Switzer and another parent in the case, which was argued before the West Virginia Supreme Court. The Institute for Justice has received $8.5 million from charities controlled by Yass over nearly a decade, according to ProPublica and Mountain State Spotlight. The court ruled 4-1 in favor of the program.
In the time since the Hope Scholarship had withstood the court challenge, Switzer’s reach had only grown. On Facebook, she administered a group that offered practical advice to hundreds of parents, or “Hope Schoolers” as she called them, on questions like which items counted as qualifying expenses and how to properly file for the program.
The program’s survival came at a useful moment for Patrick Morrisey, then the state’s attorney general, who had defended the law. Morrisey was about to run for governor. Club for Growth Action, a super PAC Yass has donated heavily to over the years, spent $10.8 million on his behalf. “Our goal in all of this is to elect people who will be champions for school freedom, lower taxes, less regulation, so businesses can thrive,” David McIntosh, the group’s president, said in an interview. Morrisey won the Republican primary with a plurality and went on to defeat his Democratic opponent in the general election. At his January 2025 inauguration, Morrisey said: “We will expand the Hope Scholarship, putting more control in the hands of parents to choose the best educational path for their children.”
Hours before Morrisey’s State of the State address earlier this year, the House Education Committee heard a report from the Rand Corporation that warned West Virginia’s education system was “in crisis.” The Rand report recommended placing an income cap on the Hope Scholarship and increasing funding for public schools. Criss took a different approach, capping the scholarship amount rather than eligibility.
Before Criss’s plan rolled out, Switzer said she received word from a member of the Finance Committee — though she did not disclose who — that the Hope Scholarship would be discussed.
Three PACs — School Freedom Fund, Sugar Maple PAC, and Americans for Prosperity-West Virginia — spent heavily on independent expenditures during the 2026 primary, targeting 10 incumbent Republicans and ousting four. All four had disagreements with the governor, and most had expressed reservations about the Hope Scholarship. Americans for Prosperity-West Virginia is affiliated with the Koch family; Yass has contributed to the other two PACs, School Freedom Fund and Sugar Maple PAC. Yass has spent more than $350 million since 2015 on political campaigns, including efforts to advance public funding for private education. Criss had been unopposed in his 2024 primary.
When Criss moved forward with his proposal, the political backlash was swift. “These elections are a warning to Republican leaders like Vernon Criss — if you oppose school freedom, expect to be held accountable,” McIntosh, who is president of School Freedom Fund and the affiliated Club for Growth, wrote in a press release at the time. Election season was right around the corner, and Americans for Prosperity-West Virginia and other groups hadn’t forgotten the Hope Scholarship battle. Criss had failed what Huffman called “a litmus test” in trying to restrict public money for parents looking for an alternative to public school. McIntosh said he received word from his allies in the Morrisey administration that Morrisey was concerned about lawmakers who had opposed him on budget issues and school choice and was looking to replace those he saw as not aligned. While the legislative backlash had been about one issue, the campaign against Morrisey’s foes went well beyond education issues.
The advertising against Criss went beyond education. Ads depicted Criss as a liberal who wanted to open borders for illegal immigration. That was based on a no vote Criss had cast against a piece of legislation that would’ve mandated employers run a citizenship check on every employee. Mailers from the School Freedom Fund depicted candidates as supporters of drag queens. Sugar Maple PAC, headed by a former state delegate and Morrisey ally, ran ads accusing opponents of being “Republicans in Name Only.” Americans for Prosperity-West Virginia sent volunteers door to door to rally for their candidates, including in Criss’s district. One flier showed Criss driving a garbage truck and accused him of taking “West Virginia’s values to the dump.” On the back, the mailer highlighted his vote against the citizenship-check bill and against West Virginia’s abortion ban. The line on the flier read: “Vernon Criss’ liberal trash,” with an image of black trash bags.
Sugar Maple PAC was newly created, and Yass contributed $450,000 to it before the primary. Among the three PACs, Sugar Maple spent the most on the Criss race: $86,000 attacking Criss and $15,000 backing Hartzog. Sugar Maple PAC and Yass did not respond to requests for comment.
A spokesperson for Morrisey said in an email that the governor is a supporter of both public schools and the Hope Scholarship and “is also grateful that organizations that share his worldview of helping West Virginia children having the best educational opportunities in the country weigh in.” Americans for Prosperity spent around $700,000 across the state, and the School Freedom Fund poured nearly $1 million into statehouse races to retain Morrisey’s allies and oust detractors.
“I think that the fact that they called me a liberal, it just stuck out,” Criss said. “You know, as the chairman of finance, I know that it’s a targeted job, obviously, that’s part of the deal. Those types of things happen, that’s just part of the politics involved here.”
Criss is now running a long-shot write-in campaign for his district in the general election. Charles Hartzog, a 23-year-old gas station cashier, beat him with 61% of the vote in the primary.