Contact: Lisa Deffendall • First Posted: Monday, August 10, 2009

High school juniors in Fayette County earned the state’s second-highest county school district average on the ACT, the well-known college entrance exam often used as a barometer of rigor and achievement in high schools.  The district’s overall score was down slightly in 2009 compared with 2008, but still above state averages. Among all districts, Fayette ranked 13^th.

“Although we’re not where we want to be with ACT scores, we had the second-highest ACT score of all county school districts in Kentucky,” said Fayette Schools Superintendent Stu Silberman. “We’ve put in place an ACT prep program that was piloted late last year. We’re hoping that this year, with the benefit of a full year of the program, we’ll boost our kids’ scores.”

Last spring marked the second year that all juniors in Kentucky were required to take the ACT, which is designed to gauge college readiness.

“One of the beauties of testing all juniors, whether they had intentions of going to college or not, is that it opens the eyes of kids who may not have realized college was within their grasp and lets them see that this is an option,” Silberman said.

In Fayette County, 2,124 juniors took the test. The overall composite score was 19.8, compared with a state average of 18.2.

Here’s how students at each school fared, in comparison with the state: