Eleven Mingo County parents have filed a lawsuit seeking to stop the universal expansion of West Virginia’s Hope Scholarship. Their children attend Dingess Elementary, a rural school facing closure after the 2026-27 school year. The parents allege that Hope’s expansion, combined with the Legislature’s failure to repair the public-school funding formula, helped create the financial conditions now being used to justify that closure.

That causal connection remains to be proved. The parents have presented a plausible, testable claim, not a judicial finding. But uncertainty should not excuse the state from examining what it already can know.

I am a West Virginian by birth and formation, one of West Virginia’s lost children, and a doctoral psychologist who studied construct validity among Appalachian children. Mingo tests whether Hope is a universal opportunity or an equal allocation only some families can convert into meaningful choice.

Mingo is not merely economically distressed. Census estimates place 25.7% of residents and 33.7% of children below the poverty line. Unemployment near 7% excludes people outside the labor force. The county’s civilian labor-force participation rate is 35.9%. Those absent from the denominator do not disappear.

Education policy can perform the same statistical disappearing act. Mingo had 15 Hope recipients in 2022-23 and 50 in 2024-25, less than 2% of public enrollment. During that period, certified enrollment fell from 3,455 to 3,369. Those figures do not prove Hope caused the decline. They show Hope expanding within a shrinking county already losing public-school infrastructure.

A 2026 RAND review commissioned by the West Virginia House of Delegates found that the funding formula provides no additional support based on low-income status. After accounting for district size, density and other factors, districts with high concentrations of poverty received only about 1% more per pupil than low-poverty districts. For districts with high versus low proportions of special-education students, the difference was effectively zero.

That is construct validity at the scale of a state budget. Enrollment can fall one child at a time. A roof, bus route, counselor or specialized teacher does not become less expensive one child at a time.

The Hope directory lists two participating schools in Mingo and two in Logan. Four names do not establish four equivalent, full-time alternatives. A directory does not report available seats, grade-level openings, disability services, added tuition, transportation or actual travel time from Dingess. Southern West Virginia is not traveled in straight lines across mountains. For a developing child, a longer ride is not just transportation. If it requires earlier waking, reduced sleep and daytime sleepiness can reduce cognitive efficiency for sustained attention, inhibitory control and processing speed before instruction begins.

West Virginia spends approximately $15,581 annually to educate a public-school student, then offers a Hope recipient $5,435.62 and calls the difference choice. Where are Mingo families to buy the rest of a child’s education, at the dollar store? Even Walmart requires crossing into Kentucky. Education is not a retail commodity. A debit account is not a school, and a discounted appropriation does not become an opportunity merely because the state gives it a promising name.

The consequences are greater for children with disabilities. Hope’s own guidance states that participation is a parental placement and releases the county school system from its obligation to provide a free appropriate public education. A scholarship is not an individualized education program. Theoretical authority to purchase services is not the same as finding qualified providers and transportation in a region where both are scarce.

Dingess Elementary’s 22% utilization rate cannot be waved away. Maintaining an underused building is expensive. But a utilization rate is a finding, not a diagnosis. The state’s review reported that Mingo County Schools’ 2024 audit had zero findings and a clean opinion, classified it as low risk, and found its unrestricted fund balance above the state average.

West Virginians need privacy-protected Hope data by ZIP code: prior placement, income, disability status, provider, expenditures and distance from a full-time school, examined alongside enrollment, closures, transportation, staffing losses and state aid. If Hope is universal in effect, the evidence should show it.

A score is not a child. A provider name is not access. And a scholarship is not a school.

Mingo’s children should not bear the burden of proving, after their school is gone, that the choice offered to them was never usable. A child cannot attend a statutory promise. Every child in West Virginia should be able to access what Bruce Springsteen called a “Land of Hope and Dreams.”

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