SPECIAL ADVERTISING SECTION
COMMUNITY BUILT
Celebrating Sixty-Five Years of the Community’ s College
In 1961, Parkersburg residents built a college of their own. Sixty-five years later, West Virginia University at Parkersburg( WVU-P) still measures itself by its partnerships.
In that year, a group of Parkersburg residents gathered at the Wood County Courthouse with a simple conviction. Their town needed a college of its own. Business owners, civic leaders, newspaper editors and school officials saw what a local institution could do, namely train the people already living and working in the Mid-Ohio Valley and open doors that had been out of reach. No other public college sat along the Ohio River between Huntington and Wheeling. Out of those meetings came a 30-person committee, and out of that committee came a college.
It opened that fall in the old Madison school building, an abandoned elementary school put back into use. One hundred and four students walked through its doors. The school bell, cast in 1902, still rings at campus ceremonies, a reminder that this institution was built by the people who needed it most.
That founding logic never left. Sixtyfive years later, the college still measures itself by the partnerships it builds, and those now stretch across industry, the arts and the civic life of the region.
The college’ s long-running partnership with Chemours puts the founders’ training mission into present-day practice. Through an incumbent worker program, hourly employees at the company’ s Wood County site take academic classes at WVU-P while they keep working, earning associate degrees as production technicians, area maintenance technicians or electrical and instrumentation technicians. Workers who finish the program receive roughly a $ 4-an-hour raise. The first cohort, 61 employees, is set to graduate in fall 2026.
“ The true measure of an incumbent worker program is not the number of degrees awarded, but the opportunities created. When employers invest in education, employees gain purpose and advancement, companies gain a stronger workforce and communities gain a more prosperous future. That’ s the power of a true education-