The top reported proficiency rate is 25% in Science. The lowest is 8% in Math.
Original Research by School Decision on Westville Jr High School
Westville Jr High School serves the seventh and eighth grades in a small, declining rural village in Vermilion County, Illinois, a short distance south of Danville. The school enrolls roughly a couple hundred students, with slightly more seventh graders than eighth graders. The student body is predominantly white, with small numbers of Hispanic, multiracial, and Black students; specific data on free-or-reduced-price lunch eligibility, students with IEPs, or English learners was not available.
State testing results from the most recent year show persistently low proficiency across both math and English language arts in the grades tested. In seventh-grade math, fewer than a quarter of students tested met proficiency standards; in eighth-grade math, proficiency fell to a single digit percentage. English language arts results followed a similar pattern: seventh graders achieved roughly a quarter proficiency, while eighth graders proficiency dropped to a tenth. Science testing data was available only for eighth grade, where proficiency climbed to roughly a quarter. Across these subjects, student participation in testing was high, above ninety percent in all grades, suggesting the low numbers reflect actual performance rather than absenteeism on test days. These results place the school in the bottom quartile of proficiency when compared to other districts in Vermilion County, indicating academic outcomes lag considerably behind peers in the surrounding region.
The school is a regular public school operated by Westville CUSD 2, which serves the district's three schools across the community. Westville itself is a village in the early stages of population decline; it has shrunk over the past several years and depends almost entirely on automobile access along Illinois Route 1. The local economy has shifted away from coal mining, its historic foundation, toward regional employment centered around Danville. Housing costs are modest relative to state and national medians, and homeownership remains accessible, though growth is stalled and development is limited. The school district functions as a significant local employer within a quiet, aging community.
A parent evaluating this school should understand that current academic performance is well below county averages and warrants direct conversation with school leadership about instruction, staffing, curriculum changes, or other factors driving these results. The school serves a small, stable student population in a community with limited economic dynamism. District-level strategic priorities or recent programmatic shifts were not readily documented in available sources, leaving open the question of what initiatives, if any, are underway to address performance. With this school being a foundational middle grades setting in a tight-knit rural place, parents may want to look into this further with the school and district directly to understand their approach to addressing low test proficiency and what support structures exist for student advancement into high school.
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