East Pennyroyal News

There were 2,847 white students enrolled in McCreary County schools in the 2022-23 school year, a 2.3% decrease from the 2,914 white students in the previous school year, according to the Kentucky Department of Education.

Data showed that McCreary County welcomed a total of 2,954 students during the 2022-23 school year. Among them, white students comprised 96.4% of the student body to be the most represented ethnicity in the county.

Among the four schools in McCreary County, Pine Knot Intermediate School recorded the highest enrollment of white students in the 2022-23 school year, with a total of 859 students, making up 95.2% 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
McCreary Central High School	97%	796
McCreary County Middle School	96.9%	651
Pine Knot Intermediate School	95.2%	902
Whitley City Elementary School	96.7%	605