Summary
Parkwood Elementary is a PK-5 public school in Durham, NC, serving 491 students in the Durham Public Schools district. The school is an extreme low performer in North Carolina, ranking 1,420th out of 1,492 elementary schools in 2025-26 — the 5th percentile, with a 0-star rating. That marks a sharp decline from the early 2020s, when the school was in the 17th-22nd percentile range. A look at schools within roughly four and a half miles shows Parkwood is the lowest-ranked of the group; Kestrel Heights School, just over a mile away, sits at the 38th percentile, while others range from the 22nd to 97th percentile.
In every tested subject and grade level, proficiency at Parkwood Elementary runs roughly 20 to 40 percentage points below the North Carolina state average, and it also trails the average for Durham Public Schools in nearly every subject. Equally high-poverty neighbors illustrate the gap: Lyons Farm Elementary, only about 1.55 miles away and in the same district, has the same near-universal free/reduced-price lunch population yet posted a 77.4% proficiency rate in 3rd grade math, compared to 31.0% at Parkwood. A similar divide appears in reading — 4th grade reading at Lyons Farm was 77.7% proficient versus 33.3% at Parkwood — and even in 5th grade science, where Parkwood's 52.3% is its strongest subject but still far below the district's 62.5%.
Perhaps the most important red flag is attendance. In 2024-25, 46.1% of Parkwood students were chronically absent — nearly one in two — compared with 36.1% across Durham Public Schools and 24.2% statewide. By contrast, Pearsontown Elementary and Southwest Elementary, two nearby district schools with the same high poverty rate, had chronic absenteeism of 16.2% and 20.5%. High household poverty, then, does not explain Parkwood's results. The data instead point to problems the school has the power to change: chronic absenteeism, gaps among student groups (low-income, English-learner, and special-education students rank near the very bottom compared with those same groups across the state), and the need for stronger reading and math instruction. Because similarly challenged schools nearby perform far better, Parkwood's current outcomes are not inevitable.
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