Original Research by School Decision on Max 50
MAX 50, formally the Max Public School District, is a small, rural North Dakota district serving students from pre-kindergarten through twelfth grade across two schools: Max Elementary School and Max High School. The district sits in McLean County, with housing data pointing to the town of Max itself plus nearby areas around Coleharbor and Garrison. The town of Max carries the most weight in the district's housing picture, and home values there run well below both the North Dakota state benchmark and the national one, making this one of the more affordable places to buy a home in the region. Nearby Coleharbor and Garrison show higher values, but their contribution to the district-wide picture is smaller. Rental data was not available, so a full picture of the rental market here is incomplete.
The district's enrollment is small, with a handful of students per grade, and the student body is predominantly white, with a small number of American Indian or Alaska Native students and a few students identifying as Hispanic, Black, or two or more races. Free and reduced-price lunch counts were not reported, so the economic profile of the student body drawn from lunch-program data is not available here. Information on special education and English learner populations was also missing, and civil-rights data on discipline, course access, and related topics was not provided. A parent wanting to understand student support services would need to contact the district directly, as these data gaps leave a real blind spot in the publicly reported picture.
Academic performance comes from North Dakota's A-PLUS assessment, administered in the most recent school year. This is a new assessment with changed cut scores, so the state has flagged that year-over-year comparisons are not reliable, and no multi-year trend data is available. What the current results show is a mixed pattern. In math, sixth and seventh grade proficiency sits in a healthy range, with most students meeting or exceeding the proficient threshold. By eighth grade, math proficiency drops into a lower band. English language arts tells a softer story across all three tested middle grades, with sixth grade in a middling range and seventh and eighth grade landing lower. Eighth grade science also falls into a low range. Participation rates were consistent across all tested grades and subjects. The pattern of stronger math in earlier middle grades giving way to weaker results by eighth grade, alongside consistently lower ELA, is something a parent might want to look into further with the school, particularly around curriculum sequencing and instructional support as students approach high school.
No high school graduation rate was included in the data provided, and no information on AP courses, career and technical education, dual-credit opportunities, or other program offerings was available. Staffing, attendance, and school environment details such as locale classification were also absent. The district brief searched for recent parent-relevant changes such as referendums, curriculum shifts, or property-tax adjustments and found none reported, so there is nothing to flag on that front.
What a family is looking at here is a very small, rural, community-rooted district where class sizes are naturally small and housing is affordable by both state and national standards. The academic data that is available covers only middle-grade testing and shows real strengths in early middle-grade math alongside weaker ELA and eighth-grade results across subjects, all under a brand-new state assessment that limits any trend reading. Many of the data points a parent might want to weigh, from economic demographics to graduation rates to program offerings, are simply not in the public record here, and filling those gaps would require a direct conversation with the district.
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