Poverty

I knew that the area we were in was a high poverty area. I had heard that most of Appalachia was poor. Just for the heck of it I googled "poorest counties in America". Our area came up quite a bit on a list of "100 poorest by median household income". (It was 2010, so not completely current.) We're located on the border between Clay and Leslie County. Clay was ranked 4th and Leslie was 15th lowest in the nation. Owsley, which is the next county north of us was 3rd. (There are a little over 3,000 counties in the U.S.) As a state, Kentucky had the most counties on the top 100 list with 29. Almost all of those 29 counties are in Southeast KY, where we are. The second highest state was Mississippi with 13 counties on the list.

A lot of this is due to the fact that coal has been the chief employer here and coal production has gone way down over time. President Obama / the EPA currently don't have any fan clubs in the area. Coal is not the cleanest source of fuel in the world and regulations regarding coal have caused a lot of the companies to shut down or curtail operations. For many, the drug trade has become a source of income. It doesn't seem to be a problem at our school, being a Christian school, but people would say that the area around us is saturated with it.