Some Hope Scholarship dollars go to Steubenville City Schools
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STEUBENVILLE -- Since it was first offered in the 2022-23 school year, West Virginia’s HOPE Scholarship program has given parents and guardians options when it comes to where and how their students will be educated.
The number of students participating in the program has increased each year, with the total growing to 14,486 for the 2025-26 school year from the 2,333 students who were enrolled during that first year.
“That’s what school choice is all about,” said Hancock County Schools Superintendent Walter Saunders. “I think that the HOPE Scholarship is putting it into the hands of the parents and the guardians to make those decisions for the students.”
A recent report covering the 2025-26 numbers issued by West Virginia Treasurer Larry Pack showed that parents and students in the Northern Panhandle were taking advantage of those opportunities: There were 210 recipients in Hancock County, 161 in Brooke County and 534 in Ohio County.
Funded by the West Virginia Legislature, HOPE is designed as an educational savings account program that is available to qualified kindergarten through 12th-grade students, it allows parents and guardians to use the state portion of their child’s education funding to develop a learning plan they feel works best for their child. Recipients were eligible for $5,267.38 during the last school year.
Pack’s report details the amount of money that followed students from one district to another. Finishing third among the top 10 education service providers was Steubenville City Schools, which received $219,913.12 in payments.
“We have about 80 kids who come across the Ohio River from West Virginia,” said Melinda Young, superintendent of Steubenville City Schools. “A good number of those are actually the students of staff members, and they don’t pay any type of tuition, nor do they get the HOPE Scholarship. Under our board policy, the kids of anybody who’s employed can come here for free.”
Steubenville is not the only out-of-state entity listed in the education service providers category. West Logan Church in Logan, W.Va., received the most in that category -- $287,923.76 --with Miacademy in Gardnerville, Nev., receiving the second-highest amount -- $287,504, the report said.
ESPs, the report said, provide direct educational services, such as tutoring or educational therapies. They can be used by scholarship recipients who are in an individualized instructional plan. They received $4,674, 075.72 in total payments.
Nonpublic schools received a total of $45,513,562.04, while microschools -- described as small, flexible learning environments initiated by a teacher or entity that charges tuition to students -- received $5,022,860.06.
The Jefferson County Christian School in Wintersville received $111,075.09, the report showed.
Those numbers likely will be higher -- changes in eligibility rules have opened the program this year to students who might not have qualified before, including existing private school students and traditional home-schooled students.
“Some of those students already have been enrolled in a different school, so it doesn’t necessarily mean that we lost 210 students to the HOPE Scholarship,” Saunders said. “This is the first year that it’s wide open for everybody. So, some of those students might already have been enrolled in private school and they just qualified, or some of them might have already been homeschooled and were not in our system.”
Students who leave with the HOPE Scholarship affect the district’s school aid formula through the state and other funding that is based on enrollment.
Steubenville officials agreed the numbers are going to look different.
“It’s going to be a little bit more this year because now everybody is eligible,” said Bobby Lamantia, the district’s treasurer. “We have had a lot of these students who have been here for first grade, second grade and third grade, and they have been paying tuition out of pocket. Once the scholarship was offered to every single person in West Virginia, those parents went out on their own and applied for those funds.”
Young said it is not unusual to have students from West Virginia who were willing to pay to enroll in the Steubenville school system.
“We’ve always had kids, and I think a lot of it is the proximity or that, possibly, their parents work in Steubenville and it might be easier for them to bring their kids here,” she explained.
She said the district has strong academics and arts programs, but added that what those students are not coming for is athletics.
“The one thing that is misunderstood out there is that people think they come across the river to play sports -- you have to be enrolled here by first grade in order to play a sport,” Young said. “Our kids who are from out-of-state and are playing sports have been with us since midway through the first grade here, but most of our kids come for preschool and then they never leave.”
It’s something the Ohio High School Athletic Association has been looking at, she said.
Hancock County Schools are competitive academically, Saunders said, adding that their balanced scorecard numbers for third grade reading and math placed them No. 1 in the state.
Saunders and Young agreed that the area’s demographics and continuing population decline have affected the number of students in area schools. That has made districts have to work harder to retain current students and attract new students.
“Our goal is to provide the best education we can, and then it’s competition,” Saunders said. “We’re all competing for fewer students, so that makes the competition even tougher. There are fewer students in Hancock County schools every year. When everybody’s declining, it makes the competition more difficult for all of the parties involved.”
“We are trying to put our best foot forward with public schools and making sure that we keep our students as well as increasing our number of students,” Young explained. “Part of it is that we are a declining population. That’s part of the issue, I’m sure. I don’t want to speak for the other districts, but we have a much larger older population that doesn’t have kids.
“If you don’t tell your story, somebody else will tell your story,” she said.