Southern Elementary School

Southern Elementary School is a K-5 school of average-sized scale in Somerset, Kentucky, part of Pulaski County, educateing 611 students in grades K through 5. That puts it 45% above the typical public school in Kentucky, which averages around 421 students.

Southern Elementary School is one of 14 schools operated by Pulaski County, a district that educates 7,729 students overall.

On demographics, Southern Elementary School logs that the student body is overwhelmingly White (82%); the rest looks like 9% Hispanic, 5% multiracial, 4% Asian. By comparison, Pulaski County as a whole is about 94% White, so the school skews noticeably less White than its surroundings.

On the income-and-resources front, Staff filings list 46 full-time-equivalent teachers, which works out to roughly 13.2:1 students per teacher. The state averages around 15.4:1, so this campus is tighter than the state norm typical. An estimated 71% of students are eligible for free or reduced-price lunch, which schools and policymakers use as a rough income-mix signal.

With demographic context factored in, Southern Elementary School performs roughly as the BeatsExpectations model predicts for a school with this FRL share. The predicted value is around 38.7%, the actual is 52.3%, a residual of +13.7 points.

Around the school, the surrounding county (Pulaski County) shows that median household income runs about $51,898, 18% of adults hold a bachelor's degree or higher, and the poverty rate sits near 16%. Across Pulaski County's 19 public schools (combined enrollment of about 9,989 students), Southern Elementary School is one campus in the mix.

The closest other public school is Southern Middle School, roughly 0.2 miles away. 8 of the 8 nearest public schools sit inside a five-mile radius. On composite proficiency, Southern Elementary School comes 5th of 7 in the immediate cluster, behind the nearby-schools average of 58.0%.

Southern Elementary School operates from a town-center location.

Five-year trend. Looking back 7 years, enrollment at Southern Elementary School has fell 9%, going from 668 students in 2018 to 611 in 2025. Over the same period, the White share ticked down from 89% to 82%. Class-load math has narrowed: from 14.9:1 in 2018 to 13.2:1 in 2025.

On this page, posts here usually surface around enrollment questions, classroom assignments, and PTA news. Members of the school community can share what they know.