# Patricia Rucker West Virginia state senator and **2025 National Chair of the Board** of the [[ALEC]]. A Venezuelan-born former homeschool parent and educator, Rucker has represented WV Senate District 16 since 2017 and is the lead legislative architect of West Virginia's **Hope Scholarship** — one of the first universal-ESA school-choice programs in the country, adopted in 2021 — which she has explicitly credited ALEC with helping shape. ## ALEC role Rucker is a longtime member of ALEC's Education and Workforce Development Task Force. Her 2025 appointment as National Chair, rotating through ALEC's tradition of seating a legislator-member as public-facing board leadership, reflects the institution's 2020s alignment with the universal-school-choice wave. Her signature policy accomplishment — a universal ESA in a poor, rural, historically Democratic-leaning state — is the proof of concept ALEC has promoted to legislators in other states. ## Role in school-choice wave See [[School Choice Ecosystem]] for the broader context. West Virginia joined Arizona, Florida, Iowa, Arkansas, Utah, Oklahoma, Indiana, and Texas in the 2021–2024 universal-ESA cascade. Rucker's Hope Scholarship was the second such program enacted (after Arizona's 2022 expansion) and has been held up as a replication template. ## See Also - [[ALEC]] - [[ALEC Ecosystem]] - [[School Choice Ecosystem]]