SE Bluegrass News

The only school district in Powell County suffered declining enrollment in the 2022-23 school year, according to the Kentucky Department of Education.

There were 2,270 students in Powell County School District, 3.4% lower than the year before.

Enrollment in Powell County fell short of the state's trend of increasing enrollment.

Of all the students welcomed in the 2022-23 school year, 53.2% of them were boys, and 46.8% were girls.

Data also showed that most of the students were white, representing 95.1% of Powell County School District's total enrollment.

Powell County School District has a main office in Stanton and is the only school district within Powell County.

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	Total Enrollment in 2022-23	Total Enrollment in 2021-22	Total % Change
Powell County High School	699	738	-5.3%
Powell County Middle School	492	528	-6.8%
Clay City Elementary School	479	514	-6.8%
Stanton Elementary School	365	385	-5.2%
Bowen Elementary School	251	204	23%
Powell County Academy	42	34	23.5%