House Republican Hess Crouse working with WV education department to create ‘school choice portal’

West Virginia Watch
By Amelia Ferrell Knisely
October 7, 2025

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Del. Kathie Hess Crouse, R-Putnam, is chair of the House Educational Choice Subcommittee. She wants to see the state provide a more efficient pathway for parents looking to exit the public school system.

Del. Kathie Hess Crouse, a “school choice” advocate in the Legislature, is working with the state Department of Education to create a “school choice portal,” along with the state’s first School Choice office. It may be housed in the state education department.

Hess Crouse, R-Putnam, is wanting the state to more efficiently assist students who are exiting the public school system to enroll in homeschooling, private schools, microschools and more.

The school choice portal, as she called it, would allow parents who are homeschooling to submit the required applications and find a certified teacher who could approve a homeschool student’s portfolio of schoolwork.

“The catalyst is just that we need to move into this century … A school choice portal was a way that I thought maybe we can have it all in one place, easy for parents to access,” Hess Crouse explained Monday at a meeting of the Educational Choice Subcommittee in the House of Delegates. Hess Crouse serves as chair of the subcommittee.

Homeschool students are required to submit a portfolio each grade level. State law doesn’t require a certain type of teaching certification or experience to review the students’ portfolios.

Parents could also submit a students’ scores onto the portal.

“Right now, parents have to either email or mail their paperwork to the county boards of Ed and then the boards have to put all that within the system,” Hess Crouse said.

The technology would have been mandated in a House bill from earlier this year, but the measure failed to get through the Senate.

Education department Deputy Superintendent Sonya White told lawmakers that the department is working on implementing the portal sans the legislative mandate.

“Sometime before the end of this month, we expect to have the site ready for initial review and testing,” White said.

The technology could reduce county school boards’ workloads when assisting families who need information from the public school system to change to homeschooling or private school. The information would now be maintained in the portal operated by the WVDE, which the department is developing in-house at no extra cost to the state.

Students are assigned a unique school identification number, known as a “WVEIS number,” in the public school system, and families need this number in order to apply for the Hope Scholarship, the state’s school voucher program.

Hess Crouse also said there will likely be legislation next year to create a state Office of School Choice.

White said the education department is exploring possibly running the office at the estimated cost of $500,000, which includes paying for a manager and four program assistants to work around the state.

“It would be contingent upon appropriation,” she said.

Hess Crouse said she’d prefer it to be housed elsewhere outside of the state department of education.

“It was something that just started with a conversation, and my vision for it may be a little different than the state board’s vision for it, but it’s basically to give parents a place to go to ask the questions and get the truthful answers on school choice,” Hess Crouse said, adding that she is told parents often receive conflicting information from school boards about their students’ options and records.

“I wanted our parents to have the correct information to where they could go and they knew the information they were going to get would be unbiased, and that they would know what they had to do, what was required for them by law, whatever choice it was they made,” she said.

State School Board President Paul Hardesty said last week that lawmakers’ focus on school choice has resulted in tens of thousands of students leaving the public school system, prompting statewide school consolidations and closures. Under the current school funding formula, counties receive state funding based on the number of students.

Sixteen public schools closed in 2024, up from nine in 2023, according to the WVDE.

“The financial instability of the system continues to grow and continues to grow and gets worse and worse,” Hardesty said, adding that the state schools were bound by many regulations while private schools and homeschools are subject to limited state guidelines.

In response to his comments, Hess Crouse put out a statement on Monday, pointing to West Virginia’s nearly-bottom ranking nationally in education outcomes.