One West Virginia lawmaker isn’t afraid to say it in black and white: “Parents are leaving the public school system because the system failed them and their children.”

Delegate Kathie Hess Crouse, a Putnam Republican, was responding to a recent speech by state Board of Education President Paul Hardesty, who blamed declining enrollment on school choice. At least 35 schools have closed since 2022, and public school enrollment is down 30,000 since 2018, or more than 10%.

Hardesty, a Democrat and former state senator, 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,” the News & Sentinel reported. 

But Crouse, who chairs the House Subcommittee on Educational Choice, said parents “are not fleeing the system because they suddenly don’t believe in education. They are leaving because public schools have stopped putting children first.” 

“Parents are sick and tired of bad teachers being protected while good teachers leave; administrators ignoring bullying from students and staff; curriculum pushing ideology instead of math, reading and science; children being left behind academically, socially and emotionally; IEPs and 504s not being followed; and not being allowed within the school or informed of students’ health choices. The list could go on,” she wrote in a recent column in The Inter-Mountain. 

“COVID accelerated this movement,” she continued. “For the first time, parents saw just how little their children were learning and how capable they were of teaching at home.” 

The state has about 24,500 homeschool students and about 14,200 participants in the Hope Scholarship Program, an education savings account that began in 2022 and will become fully universal next year. There are also about 3,400 students in charter schools. 

State spending per public school student has increased from $7,500 in 2018 to about $10,000 last year and approaches $16,000 if local and federal funds are included, Crouse wrote. The ESA scholarship, by comparison, is about $5,200. 

While Hardesty tried to blame the Legislature for shackling public schools with more than 1,300 pages of regulations – versus just a few pages for charter schools and homeschoolers – Crouse said parents “deserve to decide what works best for their children.” 

“School boards can no longer bully families into staying in a system that does not serve them. Parents are refusing to be ignored, refusing to let their children be left behind and refusing a system that will not change.” 

“School choice is not the problem. It is the solution,” she added. “At the end of the day, education belongs to parents, not the state.” 

*Published by The Lion, an initiative of the Herzog Foundation, at readlion.com.  Authored by Adam Wittenburg on October 28, 2025.