Editor’s note: This article appeared Saturday on West Virginia’s herald-dispatch.com.
Gov. Jim Justice on Wednesday signed into law allowing “microschools” and “learning pods” of unlimited size to operate in West Virginia.
The new law, Senate Bill 268, says these would be sparsely regulated schools or groups of students that could combine concepts from homeschooling, private schooling and online schooling.
A learning pod is defined in the law as “a voluntary association of parents choosing to group the children together” for a prekindergarten-12th grade school as an alternative to other schooling.
A microschool is defined as “a school initiated by one or more teachers or an entity created to operate a school that charges tuition.”
Public dollars will be able to go toward these pods and microschools if the 2021 non-public school vouchers law survives a current legal challenge.
The voucher program, called the Hope Scholarship, provides families public money for every child they remove from pubic schools.
Families can then use this money on a nearly unlimited range of public school alternatives, including traditional private schooling, traditional homeschooling, online schooling and these pods or microschools.
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