The next couple of weeks could very well determine much of the future for Hancock County Schools.

A meeting held Tuesday between local officials and the West Virginia Department of Education included discussion as to whether the district will receive an advancement of funds to meet payroll; an issue Superintendent Dan Enich said was the result of a late drawdown of $475,000.

On Jan. 26, members of the school board — and anyone else attending the board’s regular meeting — are scheduled to hear from Jeff Davis (not the former Hancock County commissioner) of Educational Consultants LLC, who has spent the last couple of months reviewing the budgets for the current school year, as well as previous school years, with the hope of getting to the bottom of where everything went wrong, and planning for the future.

Many residents of the county will be waiting for those answers and the decisions which will have to be made as a result.

Will schools be consolidated? Will staffing be reduced? Will programs need to be cut? Those and many other questions are on the minds of all Hancock County residents.

Meanwhile, the rumor mill has been in full operation. That frustration is understandable.

Everyone wants to know what happened and how it could have gotten as far as it did where there is the potential of a school district not being able to pay its educators and service personnel or meet other financial obligations.

County residents are entitled to know when suspicions of a problem were raised, let alone when it was discovered, as well as how long officials waited before making this public.

Was it one person or multiple people whose actions led to these financial problems? Was it because of a lack of proper oversight? How could it have all happened when the district’s budget is audited each year and approved by the local and state boards of education?

That leaves the biggest question of all: What happens now?

Hopefully, those answers come soon.