PARKERSBURG — There’s a lot of history in the Mid-Ohio Valley with Parkersburg on the West Virginia side of the Ohio River being chartered by the Virginia General Assembly in 1820 and Marietta on the Ohio side being the first permanent settlement established in the Northwest Territory in 1788.
Both sides have seen their populations rise and fall through the years and have also seen the coming and going of manufacturers and businesses. In the early days of Parkersburg that consisted of the oil and gas industry. Marietta had brick and boat building manufacturers populate the city in its early days.
Industries in the area changed with the times, and many came and went, but one thing that remained constant was the need to educate the youth.
Early Learning
Both sides began with one-room school houses and private learning institutions but soon grew into a public school system. Formal education in Marietta dates back to the late 1700’s and the first public high school classes taking place in 1850. Parkersburg operated in the Parkersburg Independent School System, one of the oldest in the state, between 1864-1874 and finally formed a county wide system in 1933.
Manufacturing Boom
During and after World War II, the area experienced a significant boom in manufacturing with companies like Challenger Electric, Vitrolite, Vitro-Agate, Viscose, DuPont in Washington and Ames.
“Fairplains (Elementary) was built in a very highly populated area at that time in 1945,” Wood County Schools Superintendent Christie Willis said. “In 1945 there were three companies down there, just around Fairplains Elementary. There was AB Chance, Viscose, and the one most people remember, which is Ames. … It was really built, I think, for the families of the people who were living there by their workplace.”
Marietta City Schools Board of Education member Russ Garrison said he began working at DuPont in the 70’s and it was once a cornerstone of local employment and community growth.
“I started work with DuPont in 1978 and the DuPont plant, Washington Works just south of Parkersburg, was one of the biggest plants for DuPont at this time, in terms of the number of employees,” Garrison said.
He said during this time, Marietta had a much larger student population.
“What I’ve been told, our graduating classes were a little bit more than 400 students per class,’ Garrison said. “In terms of athletics, we were competing with the large Columbus schools because when you have 400 kids in the class, you have twice as many people for every sport. So we would have been one of the biggest Division I schools in the state at that point in time.”
The Decline
Garrison said as the years went by, DuPont’s role in the community changed significantly.
“As that’s now been split into three or four different companies, a significantly smaller population,” Garrison said. “The same things are going on with the other plants up and down the river, some of which have gone away completely, and so they’re bringing in a lot fewer people into the area.”
Willis said the three major manufacturers near Fairplains Elementary also started to decline.
“Now all three of those businesses are closed,” Willis said. “And those jobs are now gone. So it’s very unfortunate.”
Economic Impact
The impact on families as the plants closed and high paying jobs began to become more difficult is still having an impact today.
“What was a very strongly middle class community in the late 70s is now, you know, not nearly as middle class as it was then,” Garrison said. “Poverty rates are significantly higher, and the struggles that come along with that.”
Data from that era is hard to find. The U.S. Census Bureau’s Small Area Income and Poverty Estimates (SAIPE) program produces single-year estimates of income and poverty for all U.S. states and counties but their records only go back to the early 200’s.
Garrison said he hasn’t seen the numbers from the 70’s but would guess the percentage of students that were at an economical disadvantage then would have been around 20-25%.
“Ten years ago, when I got on the school board, we were probably at 45% and now we’re at 52%,” Garrison said. “There are less of the higher paying jobs, and the ones available are moving down in the pay scale versus up.”
Estimates for Wood County put the percentage of county-level child poverty at around 17% in the mid-to-late 70’s. Today, those numbers are around 56.95%.
Garrison said the impact is felt acutely in the school system.
“As the population declines, there’s more pressure on the school economically… you start losing the ability to have as broad of offerings,” he said. “There’s lots of studies, lots of research that shows the impact, or the correlation between economic status and performance in school.”
He said as Marietta continues to adapt, the effects of job losses remain a central challenge for the community and its schools.
“Our economic disparity is significant and one of the issues that Marietta City Schools faces is that, as we deal with the state in funding, they consider us a rich district because our assessed value, or market value of the properties per pupil, is pretty high compared to the rest of the state, and our average income is pretty high, but our median income is very low,” Garrison said. “So, we have one of the highest ratios of average income to median income. Showing a very large disparity in income in the school district that makes addressing some of that challenging.”
Willis talked about the declining birth rates in the Mid-Ohio Valley and the age of its residents.
“The trend is that our population is getting older,” Willis said. “The Boomers are getting into their 60s and 70s now. And a lot of the younger people are moving off now because the jobs are somewhere else.”
Garrison also talked about job opportunities dwindling, with many young people having left the area in search of work elsewhere.
“I have three adult children that graduated from Marietta between 2011 and 2018. One’s in Columbus, one’s in Denver, Colorado, and one’s in Washington, D.C. … There is a significant exodus of talent because of the fewer opportunities in the area,” Garrison said.
Willis said her district continues to produce strong graduates, but many are unable to stay in the area due to limited job opportunities.
“We provide excellent graduates to the rest of the country, because there’s not a lot of jobs in a lot of markets for people to be able to stay at home if they want to. So we have a great school system, and the folks that go through our system, do great things, but to stay here … in a lot of the professions that maybe they venture into, is not possible,”
The Future
Both districts are working to adapt to the changing times and offer their students the best education they can get with the current numbers of students enrolled in Marietta City Schools at 2,060 and Wood County Schools at 11,010.
“A key element that we have been working on the last three or four years, and are getting better in place, is a much more solid and structured curriculum that does a better job of meeting the needs and getting higher academic performance, better instructional quality, better instructional results for all of the students. Some of that is the science of reading and the structured literacy approach that would focus and improve that from a math standpoint, it is a curriculum that deals with a lot of hands-on problem based learning to help build solid conceptual understanding, not just procedural fluency,” Garrison said.
“We have also focused more on mental health support asking how we address the whole child so that they’re ready to learn. Make sure they’re in school and ready to learn, and then instructional practices are solid and complete and successful. I think that is part of it,” he said.
Willis said her district is adapting its facilities and programs to better meet the needs of its students.
“One of the things that we’re trying to do is to make sure that we do have pre-K programs for parents, because our goal is, and our hope is, that if parents start with us in pre-K, they’ll continue with us throughout their school career,” Willis said. “So our new schools all have pre-K classrooms in them.”
She said as Wood County looks to the future and builds new facilities, she hopes for stability and growth.
“My hope is that we can hit a plateau, and when we do this, you know, we get the new schools built, and we may have to do, you know, another consolidation or a school closure. I’m hoping we get to the place where it stabilizes,” Willis said.
She said the district is also preparing for the possibility of growth.
“We know that if we get a population increase there, there are places on (new) buildings we can add classrooms. So there is some thought about expansion, if we would, you know, be fortunate and have businesses come to the area and families return so that what we’re building today can be expanded onto.”
Garrison also talked about the possibility of having to build new facilities.
“Over the next few years, we’re going to have to come back to those discussions around the buildings and facilities,” Garrison said. “But from my personal standpoint, the element I think that’s important for us to get in place solely first, is the high quality curriculum and high quality instructional practices. We have to know what we need in facilities to make that happen, and so we have to be working at it for a while to make sure we learn and understand what those facilities need to be to optimize the learning.”
As both districts move forward, the focus for each remains on providing the best possible education and environment for students, ensuring they are prepared to meet the challenges and opportunities of the future.