National city placement
Compact system under staffing pressure
According to NCES CCD 2024-25, Louisville has more public-school enrollment than 29% of the 4,487 US cities in this directory. Louisville has fewer enrolled students than most listed city systems, but its student-teacher ratio still falls on the more crowded side of the national distribution. That pairing rules out a simple “large city” explanation for the staffing load. Campus size, grade configuration, vacancies, and district boundaries become the more relevant questions; the profiles below expose those fields school by school without turning the ratio into a quality verdict.
A full K–12 ladder sits inside the city boundary
Louisville's list includes 2 elementary, 1 middle, and 1 high-school campus, plus 1 combined-grade record. The city average spans every major grade stage, so the ranked table is more informative when read within level than as one interchangeable queue.
The composite and staffing measures point in different directions
Louisville's average Resource Investment Index sits at the 54th percentile, while its teacher-staffing measure sits at the 17th percentile. The 37-point percentile gap is a reminder that the index is not a class-size score: counselors, gifted-program reporting, and attendance also affect it. Compare those components directly when two schools have similar index totals; the same headline score can arise from a different mix of reported resources.
