I look back with fondness on 2018, for lots of reasons. One of the biggest was the unexpected (by me anyway) wave of unrest by teachers and school service workers tired of being insulted and jerked around that resulted in a successful work stoppage that in turn set off a national--and mostly successful--wave of school strikes.
And they've paid for it ever since. The following year, the legislature rammed through laws enabling charter schools, a step mostly supported by enemies of public education and those out for payback, a Venn diagram with significant overlap. In 2021, it passed a so-called "paycheck protection" act, which was more like a paycheck reduction act, that prohibited the withholding of dues from public employee paychecks. In 2022, they shot the moon with a truly horrible False Hope Scholarship Act, that would basically allow parents to take thousands of dollars from public education funding to do whatever they want.
(It was so bad that I even heard Senator Joe Manchin talk about how crazy it was to pay people to take kids out of school at a recent event in McDowell County.)
The case went to court and fortunately today Judge Joanna Tabit overturned the law. The judge was quoted in WV MetroNews as saying
“The Hope Scholarship Program in my view undermines the free education system by requiring the Department of Education to take funds appropriated by the Legislature and transferring them to the Hope Scholarship Fund, which is then tasked for dispersing funds for private education.
“And in my view, the Legislature has violated its constitutional level obligations regarding public education and funding by enacting House Bill 2013 for the Hope scholarship fund.”
Supporters of the bill plan to appeal the decision, including the state's attorney general, whose greatest recent achievement is blocking federal action on climate change. Nuff said on that.
Still, it's a win for public education today and I'm going to savor it for as long as it lasts. Good court decisions are rare these days.
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