By Al Cross, Kentucky Lantern · May 28, 2026

ALBANY, Ky. – The rap on rural Kentucky is that it’s a swath of largely backward places that don’t value education and where the main export is human – young people who don’t come back to raise families after completing school, which for most is high school or trade school.

Like all stereotypes, there is truth in that, but never the whole truth. Increasingly, small towns in the state are bootstrapping themselves into the modern mainstream with downtown revitalization, better political leadership and – against their economic and cultural grains – higher taxes for a better future.

The latter phenomenon, and several other hopeful things, are happening in one of Kentucky’s smallest, poorest and most isolated counties – my home county of Clinton, 206 square miles and 9,200 people on the Tennessee border, where you see the first mountain as you travel east.

This is part of what’s usually called south central Kentucky, a misnomer because it’s certainly not central. I call it Southern Kentucky, defined by an arc that sweeps from Logan County on the west to Wayne County on the east and extends northward more or less to the Green River.

The region is ill-defined partly because the counties are anything but homogenous, such as the counties of the Inner Bluegrass. As Bourbon County native Ed Prichard, the late political sage of Frankfort, told me, “All those counties down there . . . they’re all a little bit different.”

In such a region, small counties are even more easily forgotten by other Kentuckians, most of whom probably don’t know even half of the state’s 120 counties. And if those of a certain age think of Clinton County, they may remember a school system that was so riven and ruled by politics that it became a Mike Wallace story on “60 Minutes” in 1984.

But Wallace opened his report with scenes of the fields and forests of the county’s Appalachian foothills and called it “handsome country.” And so it is. A long spur of Cumberland Plateau foothills juts into the middle of the county, Lake Cumberland and famous 76 Falls are on the north, Dale Hollow Lake is on the southwest, and the Cumberland River is on the northwest. It was a beautiful place to grow up, and it still is.

Clinton County High School in Albany sits in front of one of those foothills, and has needed replacing for decades. Local and state reforms largely de-politicized the schools, but this is a poor county where taxes have been political poison and the benefits of education have often seemed distant. Ten years ago, the county tied for the nation’s lowest percentage of college graduates, 2 percent of the population.

Nickel taxes?

Now things are changing.

That became clear last year, when the county school board imposed an extra tax of 10 cents per $100 worth of property to finance a new $40 million high school, on top of the existing 46 cents. It was subject to a recall petition that would have put the tax on the ballot for voters to decide, but no petition was filed.

Why not? “The only honest answer I can give you is prayer,” said School Supt. Wayne Ackerman, reflecting the religious roots of the county and his native Pulaski County. A petition was started, but a school-board member shamed the circulator into relenting, and Ackerman said school advocates also pushed back on social media.

I first interviewed Ackerman at the May 11 ceremonial groundbreaking for the school, where several politicians complimented voters’ willingness to tax themselves. The voters didn’t vote, but tacitly gave “the consent of the governed,” as the Declaration of Independence defined the basic principle of democratic government 250 years ago.

And this was not an ordinary tax. It was a “double nickel,” twice the normal 5-cents-per-$100 that earns special more-than-matching money from the state. And it got in “under the wire,” Ackerman said, because the latest session of the General Assembly stopped the special matches, at least for now.

Most counties have passed a nickel for school construction, but very few have passed a double nickel, state Education Commissioner Robbie Fletcher told me after the ceremony. Some have recently tried and failed, said Chay Ritter, Fletcher’s director of district support.

Fletcher, addressing students at the groundbreaking, gave them credit.

“This community trusts the school system,” which is showing progress in student test scores, “but they also see the students in the community,” he said. “There is no doubt in my mind, there are people who looked at the students and said, ‘Do they deserve a new building? Do they deserve the money that’s coming out of my pocket?’ . . . You helped build that trust. You played just as important a role as anybody under this tent . . . You played a major role in building that trust so this community would invest in you . . . the most important group.”

The county’s children have as much potential as any, and deserve facilities that don’t get in the way of their education, School Board Chair Leslie Stockton told the groundbreaking crowd. She said taxpayer support of them “shows a belief in the future, that the best days are still ahead. . . . In a rural community like this, the school system is the heart of our town. This new high school will strengthen that heartbeat,” and will send a message: “You matter. Your future matters.”

More broadly, state Rep. Josh Branscum of Russell Springs told the crowd, “Today proves that Clinton County is moving forward with confidence and with vision.”

Branscum and others have worked successfully to get the county a big natural-gas line, which it needs to attract more industry; continued reconstruction of US 127, a long-sought northern link for a county that has long looked to Tennessee and is in Nashville’s TV market; and improvements to the overextended and poorly maintained Albany water system, which serves most of the county, including a huge Tyson Foods chicken-processing plant. The state is also building a new judicial center in Albany.

Purely local efforts include a community foundation affiliated with the Foundation for Appalachian Kentucky; a nonprofit that revived the 76 Falls Country Club and golf course; a local philanthropist’s recent purchase of a historic church building for a local museum; and the July 3-4 Spirit of 76 Celebration, which is asking, “What better place to celebrate the 250th birthday of our country, the spirit of 1776, than the only place in America named Seventy Six?”

More signs of change

Eight days after the high-school groundbreaking, there was another sign of change. Mickey McFall, the county school superintendent in 2002-12, outpolled a strong field of candidates for county judge-executive to win the GOP nomination, which is nearly tantamount to election in this strongly Republican county. (My old classmate George Keith Byrd is the Democratic nominee.)

As far as I can tell, only one other Kentucky county has had a former school superintendent as judge-executive: Woodford, which elected Joe Gormley in 1998 and 2002 and voted him out in 2006. Woodford is one of the state’s richest and best-educated counties.

Judge-executive is a very different job, which requires working with an elected fiscal court, but McFall told me that the outcome of the magisterial primaries “tells me the people of Clinton County are willing to take a step forward. I think [the fiscal-court nominees] are all there for the betterment of the county as a whole.”

And why didn’t the double nickel for the high school prompt a referendum? “Those that have an interest in the improvement of our school system kind of voiced their opinion in support of that project, and there wasn’t a lot of resistance to that,” McFall said, though few residents were aware of the physical condition of the school.

“It’s a significant tax increase for our county,” said McFall, who comes from a family of educators. “I think the folks of Clinton County by and large want to see the best for our students.”

Is it a signal of bigger things? “I think it’s just a sign of the changing of the times, step by step,” McFall said. “People in Clinton County are conservative, and most, if not all of us, would prefer not paying any more taxes than necessary,” but increasingly are concerned “about how do we compete with counties around us and beyond?”

Albany’s isolation, 115 miles from any metropolitan center but Bowling Green, contributed to the past generation’s attitude, McFall said: “Your world was smaller then.” He said people looked at neighboring counties and thought “If we’re as good as they are, then we’re doing OK. Now we’re looking beyond that.”

In his campaign, McFall said he would try to create the kind of jobs that would allow young people who want to stay in Clinton County to “get a career at decent wages and raise a family. . . . The future’s maybe looking like we can reach that.”