Danvillians have affectionately dubbed their hometown “the comeback city” for the way it has rebounded from a severe economic downturn after the main industry, a textile mill, shut down two decades ago. The city has bounced back in many areas — economic development, tourism and visitation, blight removal, crime reduction — but public education is not yet one of these.
Coming Wednesday
Danville has increased the amount it spends on education and is focusing on efforts to boost school accreditation an attendance. Local leaders say the efforts are paying off.
The Danville public school division, which serves about 5,600 students, has seen recent gradual increases in student performance, but pass rates for the state Standards of Learning tests are far below state averages and those of neighboring localities, and have been for years.
The Virginia Department of Education released SOL data for the 2024-2025 school year Aug. 27.
Reading and math pass rates rose in Danville over the previous school year, with about 56% of students passing the reading SOL and about 53% of students passing the math SOL. This is an increase from a 53% pass rate for reading and a 48% pass rate for math last year.
Across Virginia, however, pass rates were much higher: About 74% of students passed the reading SOL and about 72% passed the math SOL statewide last year.
It wasn’t always this way.
“Danville Public Schools were the schools of choice in the region for a long time, when Dan River Mills was up and running,” said City Manager Ken Larking.
A community’s public education system is heavily impacted by its economy, more so than most people might think, said Brendan Bartanen, a professor of education at the University of Virginia.
When Dan River Mills — a textile plant that was the city’s largest employer by far — shuttered in 2006, student achievement fell, too.
Throughout the 2000s and the 2010s, several Danville schools lost accreditation, meaning they failed to meet the academic standards set by the state.
“When you boil down the question, ‘Why are test scores so low?’ the primary factor is socioeconomic status,” Bartanen said. “The correlation between things like a student’s family income level and their test score levels is very, very high.”
Economic factors also impact education on more than just a personal level.
The health of a locality’s economy influences how much money it can put toward public education. Public school funding comes from both local and state sources, and the healthier a locality’s economy is, the more money it can contribute.
Funding is a huge component of a school system’s operations, affecting salaries, quality of and access to resources and technology, and physical conditions of school buildings.
The city has put significant time, effort and money into revitalization projects, but it has been challenging to move the needle on student achievement, Larking said.
Addressing this has been a top priority for the city for several years, alongside economic development and crime reduction, Larking said. Now that those two areas have seen significant improvement, education is the city’s number one priority.
Like the rest of Danville’s revitalization, it won’t happen overnight.
“When so many students are behind, it’s not something that you’re going to be able to address in a year, or two years, or even five years,” Bartanen said. “You’re talking about trying to make difficult, large-scale changes that would have a pretty long time horizon.”
The schools of choice, once: How scores declined in Danville
When Ray Robinson first began teaching in the 1970s, city schools outperformed other school districts in the region, he said.
He remembers that some folks who worked in next-door Pittsylvania County — or even across the state line in Caswell County, North Carolina — would choose to live in Danville to send their kids to the city schools.
“The city offered, and in some cases still does, more programming than the surrounding school systems,” Larking said. “The international baccalaureate program is something that isn’t offered everywhere. Sports programs were often more robust. So there’s lots of reasons why people would want to put their kids in Danville Public Schools. Also, they felt the achievement was where it ought to be.”
In 1986, Danville Public Schools had a graduation rate of almost 76%, higher than nearby Pittsylvania County’s rate of 73%, according to an article from that year in the Danville Register & Bee.
In 1993, the city’s public schools received the U.S. Senate’s Productivity and Quality Award, which recognizes “exceptional organizations that have demonstrated best practices and superior achievement” across industries, according to the award’s website.
“The award puts Danville Public Schools in select company,” said an April 17, 1994, article in the Danville Register & Bee. “Only four other state school divisions … have earned this honor.”
And then Dan River Mills closed in 2006 and around 14,000 people lost their jobs almost overnight. A mass exodus of the middle class in Danville followed, said Robinson, who retired the following year, after 37 years as a teacher.
Danville’s population had peaked around 1980, when the textile business was thriving. About 56,700 people lived in the city that year, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau. As the industry declined, so did the population.
In 2000, Danville’s population was just over 48,000. By 2010, four years after the mill had closed, that number had dropped to about 43,000.
Larking, who began working in Danville in 2013, said that this outmigration had a ripple effect on student performance.
“As the middle class declined in Danville after the closure of Dan River Mills, the children of those folks were no longer in the school system,” he said.
Danville’s poverty rate rose, reaching 27% in 2010, according to census data. The statewide poverty rate that year was 11%.
The rate was even higher for Danville’s children: 37%.
Today, Danville’s overall poverty rate is about 25%. In neighboring Pittsylvania County, it’s 15%, and in Virginia it’s about 10%.
Poverty has a close relationship with student achievement, said Angela Hairston, who has been Danville’s schools superintendent since 2020.
“We can’t deny that our poverty rate is higher than other districts in the region, and that plays a role in education,” Hairston said. “Schools do not live apart from their communities. … We are not in a separate bubble.”
The increase in Danville’s poverty rate after the mill’s closure aligns with declining test scores.
Virginia launched the Standards of Learning testing in 1998. In the early 2000s, Danville scores were below state averages, but often by less than 10 percentage points.
Around 2012, before the majority of Danville’s revitalization efforts were underway, city scores began to diverge more severely and dropped well below state averages.
This is not uncommon, Bartanen said. In fact, a community’s economy often has a bigger impact on student achievement than a school system itself.
“Schools have a pretty limited influence over driving test score changes, which might sound a little surprising,” Bartanen said. “We often have an unreasonable expectation about what schools can do to ameliorate the negative effects of poverty.”
Financial challenges at home “make working on homework secondary to other things,” Larking said.
And children in impoverished families might have after-school jobs to help contribute income and often come to school less focused, said Robinson.
“When there’s an emotional weight that students carry to school, their concentration is not the same,” he said.
The closure of Dan River Mills also coincided with the continued rapid growth of the internet — meaning Danville’s declining SOL scores were increasingly available online, Larking said.
“It was a perfect storm almost,” Larking said. “That data was there to be looked up. If a parent had the ability to choose where to send their kids, oftentimes they’d choose to send their kids somewhere else just because of the [SOL score] decline itself.”
That created a feedback loop, a “downward spiral that is hard to reverse,” Larking said. “It’s very difficult to dig yourself out of that situation.”
The available information on test scores raised a red flag for Rosalind Cobb Scott when she was sending her only son, Isaiah, to kindergarten seven years ago.
“I’m a very, very involved parent,” she said. “Test scores, class sizes, all that is important to me, especially because I just have one child. … Yeah, I was concerned.”
Isaiah, now 12 years old, started at G.L.H. Johnson Elementary School and has been in the Danville school district ever since.
Cobb Scott still chose to send Isaiah to the city’s public schools — even though the data showed that student achievement is much different today than when she graduated from George Washington High School in 1995.
“A lot has changed in 30 years,” she said.
Coming Wednesday: Danville has increased the amount it spends on education and is focusing on efforts to boost school accreditation an attendance. Local leaders say the efforts are paying off.