NE Kentucky News

There were 222 African American students enrolled in Mason County schools in the 2022-23 school year, a 1.3% decrease from the 225 African American students in the previous school year, according to the Kentucky Department of Education.

Data showed that Mason County welcomed a total of 2,732 students during the 2022-23 school year. Among them, African American students comprised 8.1% of the student body to be the third most represented ethnicity in the county.

Among the four schools in Mason County, Mason County High School recorded the highest enrollment of African American students in the 2022-23 school year, with a total of 75 students, making up 8.7% 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 African American Students Enrolment	Total Enrollment
Mason County Intermediate School	7.5%	559
Mason County High School	8.7%	866
Mason County Middle School	8.4%	621
Charles Straub Elementary School	7.7%	686