CHARLESTON, W.Va. – Schools across West Virginia are requesting more than a quarter of a billion dollars in state funds for school safety improvements during the 2025-26 school year.
That figure was revealed on Wednesday at the West Virginia Board of Education’s meeting with the presentation of the 2024-25 West Virginia School Safety and Security Report.
“Local counties spent $40,709,676 last year, and then we are requesting $252 million moving forward,” School Facilities Director Micah Whitlow said.
All 55 county school systems, six multicounty vocational centers, two charter schools, and the West Virginia School for the Deaf and Blind made funding requests for school security. According to Whitlow, that daunting number comes in part due to larger figures requested by state legislators.
“The legislature in the past years has asked what it would cost to put security cameras in all the schools. Some of these numbers include things that the legislature has asked for numbers for, so it kind of has a few different levels of requests there,” he said.
Whitlow noted some of the successes the state has had in increasing school safety. In the last five years, he said West Virginia has made significant progress with the 368 schools that needed safe school entries.
“Currently reported, it is 232, so there has been that gradual decline of that need due to counties taking a priority for safety and investing funds to get those entries built,” he said.
As for the more than $252 million requested in the report, Whitlow explained that while there is a lot of money being asked for, only so much can be used in a given year.
“I know even with safe school entries, there’s only so many you can build. There’s only so many designers. There’s only so many contractors. I know with resource officers, we don’t have enough people in this state to accomplish this. There’s staffing shortages with everybody,” Whitlow said.
One of the priorities listed in the report is funding for more than 13,000 security cameras to be installed in schools.