Danville CityET is one of only three Virginia school divisions where the graduation rate declined every single year from 2019 to 2023. The others at least had a COVID-era bounce to interrupt the slide. Danville did not.

In 2019, the division graduated 81.8% of its students. By 2023, that number was 73.3%, a drop of 8.5 points that left Danville as the second-lowest division in the state, behind only Richmond.

The Dropout Rate Tells the Other Half

As the graduation rate fell, the dropout rate moved in mirror image. It climbed from 9.4% in 2019 to 17.0% in 2023, an increase of 7.6 points that represents the largest deterioration of any Virginia division over this period.

In concrete terms, roughly one in six students in Danville's Class of 2023 dropped out. That is more than three times the statewide rate of 5.4%.

Falling Further Behind

The gap between Danville and the state has widened steadily. In 2019, Danville trailed Virginia by 9.8 points. By 2023, the gap was 18.6 points. The state moved slightly downward from its 2021 peak. Danville moved sharply downward without interruption.

What makes Danville's trajectory unusual is the absence of the COVID bounce that most struggling divisions experienced. Richmond went from 70.9% in 2019 to 78.5% in 2021 before falling back. Danville's version of 2021 was 79.1%, barely above its 2019 level, and it kept declining from there.

The Context

Danville is a former tobacco and textile city in southern Virginia that has been working through a multi-decade economic transition. The city's population has declined, its poverty rate is above the state average, and its school system serves a community where the economic forces that make graduation harder have been intensifying.

George Washington High School, the division's primary high school with a cohort of 314 students in 2023, graduated 71.0% of its students with a 20.4% dropout rate. Those numbers place it among the highest-dropout schools in the state outside of alternative education programs.

Four consecutive years of decline is not a blip. Whatever Danville has tried, it has not bent the curve. The next school board budget cycle will show whether the division treats this as a crisis or a trend to be managed.

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