The Appalachian School of Law in Grundy is exploring a merger with a Kentucky university amid ongoing financial challenges and low enrollment.
The effort comes as Buchanan County has agreed to pump millions of dollars into the private law school in an effort to prevent the school from closing.
Jerry Kilgore, chair of the ASL board of trustees and a former state attorney general, said last week that he has appointed a committee to explore a partnership with the University of Pikeville, or UPike, in Kentucky.
UPike President Burton Webb confirmed that his board of trustees has given him permission to explore what an acquisition could look like for both institutions.
The board hasn’t authorized any action yet, Webb said last week, but could decide on a path forward as soon as this fall. Kilgore said the ASL committee has met once with UPike representatives, but the law school will continue operating as-is this coming academic year.
Pikeville is just over 40 miles from Grundy in Kentucky. The small private college enrolls about 2,500 students across a range of graduate programs, dual enrollment and undergraduate degrees and last fall launched a $50 million fundraising campaign to expand and improve university academics and facilities.
In 2024, UPike brought in about $2.09 million in additional income, according to its 2024 tax filing, compared to a $3.55 million deficit recorded by the Appalachian School of Law that same year.
In February, Buchanan County supervisors agreed to provide $3.4 million to keep the law school afloat, following a request for as much as $6 million.
The county’s investment came after news broke in December that the law school was considering a merger with Roanoke College, a move that could have drawn the school away from Grundy — a concern for many in the community.
Kilgore said last week that wasn’t something the majority of the ASL board is now interested in pursuing. In April, ASL released a statement committing to staying in Grundy. A spokesperson for Roanoke College declined to comment last week.
“The law school has been such an economic driver in the Buchanan County area and Grundy in particular, and we want to continue to be supportive,” Kilgore said. “The board has voted in the past to make sure that as we’re looking at merger discussions, acquisition discussions that we make it clear that we want the law school to stay in Grundy.”
The Appalachian School of Law was founded in 1994 in part to boost Buchanan County’s economy.
A 1996 agreement between the law school and the county granted ASL its academic and library buildings, along with some renovation and operations funding, and supervisors have said a merger or relocation would require approval by both the board of supervisors and the county’s industrial development authority.
In December, Buchanan supervisors discussed a possible merger with Roanoke College during an emergency meeting where ASL President and Dean David Western told supervisors that the school needed about $2.5 million to remain open through the spring. He said spending has outpaced revenue due to low enrollment and the costs of running an independent law school, of which there are just over a dozen nationwide.
Buchanan County Administrator Robert Craig Horn, commissioner of the revenue Ruth Horn, and Matthew Fields and Heather Street of the Buchanan County Industrial Development Authority did not respond to requests for comment for this story. County supervisors Trey Adkins, Roger Rife and Craig Stilner could not be reached.
A representative from the University of Pikeville attended that emergency December meeting via Zoom for a discussion about the possibility of Buchanan General Hospital partnering with the university on a medical school program, but ultimately did not speak on the issue.
Webb said last week that the university remains in preliminary talks with the hospital about it serving as a clinical placement site for some of the school’s nursing or medical students.
A shared mission
Webb said his university isn’t ready to announce any official partnership or other move with ASL, but he noted the shared vision and similarities across the two institutions.
“We’re all about Appalachia,” Webb said. “We want to do things to strengthen Appalachia. I have no desire to start a program in Lexington or Louisville or Northern Kentucky. We want to take care of the kids in the mountains and the folks that businesses and others have in the mountains. And I think that matches well with what ASL and what ASL’s board wants to do.”
Webb envisions students living in Pikeville and commuting to Grundy or vice versa and said he sees no reason to move ASL out of Grundy
With the eventual completion of the Coalfields Expressway, Webb predicts there will be more traffic between the two localities.
“We think that we’ll see a lot more commerce between the two regions,” he said. “So we need to figure out, just as a region, how do we work together as Virginia, West Virginia and eastern Kentucky? Because all of us have one thing in common, and that is, the capitals of our states are a long way away.”
UPike’s current capital fundraising campaign, “Reaching New Heights,” aims to raise $50 million for the school’s new Tanner College of Dental Medicine, the development of an athletic complex and an increase in scholarships to “reshare the future of education, healthcare, athletics and student success in Central Appalachia.”
The school launched the Kentucky College of Osteopathic Medicine in 1997 and has 10 other graduate programs.
“[Western] and I are starting a conversation now to get kind of into all the details of what any kind of partnership might look like moving forward,” Webb said. “We’re not ready to announce anything. We don’t know what it would look like, but we’ve committed to carrying out the conversation and doing all of the, for lack of a better term, due diligence to make sure that we understand everything about each other before we make any kind of a decision.”
Western said the institutions have a history of working together.
“We already have a long-standing working relationship,” he said. “We’re looking forward to any further partnership that we might be able to work out with the University of Pikeville.”
Last fall, the two institutions teamed up to offer a new online degree. The master’s of legal studies, or MLS, program is geared toward professionals who might not be interested in becoming attorneys, but are interested in the law. About a dozen students are already enrolled, Western said.
About half of the courses for the program are taught by Pikeville political science and criminal justice professors, and the other half are taught by ASL law professors, Webb said.
