photo by: Ben Conley

West Virginia Academy currently is located in a rented office building behind a bowling alley in Morgantown.

MORGANTOWN — In June 2024, West Virginia Academy purchased 19.2 acres near Cheat Lake for $406,310.

Now the state’s first charter school is looking to make that land the focal point of its academic and extracurricular activity.

West Virginia Academy Ltd. is currently accepting proposals for architectural services for the opening phase of a multi-building Falling Water Campus, located immediately adjacent to Cheat Lake’s Falling Water development.

The project, currently estimated at $6 million to $9 million, will get underway in August and is expected to conclude in July 2027.

West Virginia Academy, which first opened its doors to students in the fall of 2022, has about 300 pre-K through 12th-grade students enrolled for the upcoming academic year.

Chairman and Founder John Treu said the Falling Water Campus will become the school’s primary location. The question of whether it will initially be its only location will be based on the rate of growth over the next few years.

“In terms of size, part of that’s going to depend on the architecture and what we can sustain out there, but we’re looking to do a facility that would house about 500 students,” Treu said. “Then Phase II would potentially do more than that, but that’s the number that we’re currently looking at.”

At present, the school is operating in a rented 26,000-square-foot office building located off Chestnut Ridge Road behind the Suburban Lanes property.

“Our current facility is a rented facility, and it’s nice in the sense that it’s convenient to downtown, but we don’t have a lot of outdoor space and playground space, and we have to do a lot of things off-site for extracurriculars, particularly for the secondary school,” Treu said. “With the new facility we’ll have a full basketball/volleyball gym. We’ll have a mountain biking track, which will align with our mountain biking teams. We’ll just have a lot more space in general, sitting on a 19-acre piece of land. We do intend to keep a lot of it forested, so it’ll be different than traditional public schools, but we’re excited about the design of a new facility and what we’re looking to do.”

Asked for a general status update as a pioneer among West Virginia’s public charter schools, Treu said a lot of good work has been accomplished.

For example, the school was selected as the 2023 recipient of a $500,000 Yass Prize as an innovator in education. Treu said those funds helped purchase the Cheat Lake property the academy will soon call home.

In June, the school received early renewal of its five-year charter agreement with the Professional Charter School Board after meeting “every one of its measurable goals” in just two years. The academy’s new five-year term began July 1 and runs to 2030.

“There have been a lot of surprises, too, that we would have preferred not to have. As the first charter school ever, I think the [state] Department of Education has really had to figure out how things were going, and there were a lot of instances where we were not receiving the appropriate amount of funding we were entitled to as a charter school. We had to fight a few battles there,” Treu said. “Funding has always been a challenge, but things have gotten dramatically better since we first opened. There’s still a pretty significant funding gap between traditional schools and charter schools, but we’ll keep working to close it.”

According to Treu, the Falling Water Campus project received $3 million from the School Building Authority of West Virginia, and a $600,000 federal grant for furnishings, computers and equipment.