The top reported proficiency rate is 38% in English language arts. The lowest is 21% in Math.
Original Research by School Decision on Van Devender Middle School
Van Devender Middle School sits on 31st Street in Parkersburg, the county seat of Wood County and the largest city in the Parkersburg-Vienna metropolitan area. The school serves grades six through eight as part of Wood County Schools, a regular public school in a district that, publicly reported sources note, spreads multiple middle schools and more than a dozen elementary schools across the city. Parkersburg itself is an Ohio Valley river town where the Ohio and Little Kanawha rivers meet, with a downtown core of museums and civic institutions and residential neighborhoods radiating outward on both sides of the river. The built environment is car-oriented, shaped by Interstate 77 and US 50, and the city has been in a slow population decline for years as its industrial base has waned.
The school is small for its grade band. Its student body is predominantly white, with small numbers of students identifying as two or more races, Black, Hispanic, and Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander. Demographic data on free or reduced-price lunch, individualized education programs, and English learner status were not available, so a parent would need to ask the school directly for that picture. Title I status was also not reported in the data we received.
Academically, the most recent state assessment results, from the 2024-25 school year, paint a mixed portrait. In English language arts, Van Devender lands in a middling range. A little over a third of seventh and eighth graders reached proficiency, and the sixth grade figure was modestly higher. Those are not strong numbers, but they are not far out of line with what many West Virginia middle schools show. Reading proficiency held fairly steady across the three grade levels, which at least suggests consistency in literacy instruction through the middle school years.
Math is the clearer soft spot. Proficiency drops as students move up through the grades, with sixth grade starting at the low end and eighth grade finishing lower still. By the time students reach eighth grade, only a small fraction are scoring proficient in math. Science, tested only in eighth grade, falls in a similar low-to-middling range. Participation rates were high across all tested grades and subjects, which means the results reflect nearly the full student body rather than a skewed subset. A parent considering this school would want to look into what supports and interventions are in place for math in particular, and how the school plans to address the slide from sixth through eighth grade.
We looked for multi-year trend data to see whether these results represent a dip or a longer pattern, but only a single year was available, so no trend could be assessed. We also looked for program offerings such as advanced coursework, career exploration, arts, or extracurriculars, and none were reported in the data. The same was true for staffing, discipline, attendance, and course access details. These gaps are common in school-level data sets and do not by themselves signal a problem, but they do mean a parent would need to go to the school or district for a fuller picture of daily academic and social life.
Because Van Devender is a middle school, there is no graduation rate to report and no high school course pathway to describe. Civil rights data were also absent from what we received.
On the housing side, the surrounding zip code carries a typical home value well below the national benchmark and modestly below the West Virginia state benchmark, reflecting the broader economic context of a post-industrial river city with a slowly declining population. The estimated monthly mortgage on a typical home in the area is modest, and rent affordability relative to local income is favorable. For a family already in Parkersburg or considering a move there, housing costs near the school are among the more affordable in the state, though the local economy has limited growth drivers. The Bureau of the Fiscal Service, a federal employer, is a civic anchor, but the industrial employers that once defined the city have largely faded.
We searched for recent district-level changes such as levy or bond elections, construction projects, curriculum shifts, or policy updates, and found little of lasting impact, so we left that out rather than guess. In short, Van Devender is a small, conventional middle school in an affordable, historically industrial river town, with literacy results that hold their own and math results that a parent would want to question before enrolling. The missing program and demographic data mean the school itself is the next stop for anyone wanting to understand what the day-to-day experience looks like.
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