We must end the giveaway to out-of-state private schools.  I will fight to end the Hope Scholarship, a fiscal Armageddon that will soon exceed $1,000,000,000 that taxpayers will be on the hook for, and repurpose those funds to our struggling school districts.

I will support local school districts by advocating to fully fund the cost of student IEPs, costs that are far greater than the standard student funding allocation formula.

Data from the West Virginia Department of Education showed that for home-schooled students in grades requiring assessments (3, 5, 8, and 11), only about 37 to 58 percent of families submitted the required academic progress records to their local county boards between 2020 and 2024. That is grossly unacceptable and places West Virginia on a path to have the least educated children in the US. I will introduce legislation that requires annual testing of home-schooled children to ensure that they are learning at the same level as our public school students. If a test is not conducted by the stricter standards that would be included in the legislation, then the student must 'test-in' to the appropriate grade-level and complete education by attending public or private school.

I will support legislation that adopts an initial 'catch-up' COLA, and a permanent COLA for teacher pensions, so that our retired teachers can live a life without fear of poverty from rising medical, housing, utility and food costs.

I will support legislation that raises teacher and paraprofessional salary levels to the national median for both categories over a 3-year period.

I will support additional funding for public school Career Technical Education (CTE) and adult Advanced Career Education (ACE). Anyone in HD 85 that has tried to find licensed and bonded trade professionals to repair, restore, or build a house know how difficult that is to do and how well-compensated tradesmen and women could become in the building trades.