Paintsville Independent

Paintsville Independent serves 752 students across two schools in Paintsville: Paintsville Elementary School (pre-K–6, 434 students) and Paintsville High School (grades 7–12, 318 students). The most important takeaway is that elementary reading is often stronger than Kentucky’s results, while high-school performance is uneven and stands out most in writing.

Paintsville Elementary has the clearest reading strengths: in 2025–2026 it was 17 points above the state in third grade and 16 points above in sixth grade; fourth-grade math was 12 points above. Its sharpest weakness was fifth grade, where math was 18 points below the state, social studies 20 points below, and writing 13 points below. Paintsville High stood out in 11th-grade writing, 18 points above the state, and was also above state results in both tested social-studies grades. Its weaker results included 10th-grade reading, 11 points below the state, and math, 10 points below. Because the schools serve different grades, they cannot be directly ranked against each other overall.

Recent results vary by grade and subject rather than moving in one direction: elementary fourth-grade reading rose 22 points from 2024–2025 to 2025–2026, while fifth-grade reading fell 14 points. At the high school, 10th-grade reading fell 25 points and math fell 22. SchoolDigger’s percentile rank rose from the 39th to the 53rd percentile for elementary, but fell from the 88th to the 57th for the high school. In 2024–2025, student-teacher ratios were 14.4 and 12.2, respectively; free/reduced lunch eligible shares were 50% and 47%. These are contextual differences, not explanations for results. Chronic absenteeism was above the state rate at both schools in 2025–2026: 30% at elementary and 32% at the high school, versus 24% statewide.