SW Bluegrass News

There were 2,885 white students enrolled in Mercer County schools in the 2022-23 school year, a 1.5% decrease from the 2,928 white students in the previous school year, according to the Kentucky Department of Education.

Data showed that Mercer County welcomed a total of 3,497 students during the 2022-23 school year. Among them, white students comprised 82.5% of the student body to be the most represented ethnicity in the county.

Among the seven schools in Mercer County, Mercer County Elementary School recorded the highest enrollment of white students in the 2022-23 school year, with a total of 673 students, making up 83.2% of the school's total student body.

Despite escaping some of the pandemic's educational disruptions, Kentucky's achievement gaps have remained an issue since 2019. In the eighth-grade reading assessments, for example, Hispanic students scored eight points lower than their white peers, and the gap reached 15 points in math. Black students fared even worse, falling more than 20 points behind and facing a failure rate nearly double that of their white counterparts.

School name	% of White Students Enrolment	Total Enrollment
Burgin Independent School	89.1%	542
Mercer County Senior High School	81.2%	762
Mercer County Day Treatment	59.4%	32
Kenneth D. King Middle School	80.4%	657
Mercer Central	75.7%	70
Mercer County Intermediate School	81.6%	625
Mercer County Elementary School	83.2%	809