CHARLESTON, W.Va. — The West Virginia Professional Charter School Board has been given the green light from the federal government to begin accepting grant applications from charter schools across the state.
The U.S. Department of Education on Wednesday approved the board’s Request for Applications (RFA) for Charter Schools Program (CSP) grant funding.
The board’s Executive Director James Paul said the grants will help improve and open more charter schools in West Virginia.
“The RFA is for new charter schools or existing charter schools that are hoping to expand their operations,” Paul said. “What we’re prepared to do and what we’re planning to do this fiscal year is to offer two subgrants: one for a school that’s not yet open and one for a school that seeks to expand.”
Applications from eligible schools be collected soon, according to the board’s Assistant Director Dusty Hurley.
“I would anticipate that within the next week to two weeks at the latest we’ll probably go ahead and publish the RFAs so that potential grant applicants could look at that. Approximately two weeks after that, the grant application period would open and four weeks after that it would close,” Hurley said.
Hurley said the board plans to use a portion of the grant funding to provide technical assistance to charter schools for training and recruitment.
“We are also going to seek a technical assistance contractor to help us solicit charter schools so we have a great pipeline of charter schools that know about West Virginia as a place to open charter schools and also draw from maybe even local interested individuals who might be thinking of a charter school so that we will have new applicants,” she said.
Hurley said they also want to train charter school boards so they can perform their governance more effectively.
West Virginia passed a state law allowing charter schools in 2019.