Original Research by School Decision on Chisago Lakes Hs Alt Learning Prog
Chisago Lakes High School Alternative Learning Program is an alternative school serving students in grades nine through twelve within the Chisago Lakes School District. It operates in Lindström, a primarily residential small town in Chisago County roughly northeast of the Twin Cities, which functions as a bedroom community surrounded by multiple lakes and known for its Swedish immigrant heritage. The town has a compact downtown core, but the school sits outside that downtown as part of a multi-community district whose schools are spread across the area rather than concentrated in Lindström’s civic center.
Because of the nature of this school, which is designated as an alternative program, many of the standard academic performance measures that families typically look at were not available. The school reported no state assessment results for any subject or grade. No data on proficiency across tested subjects was reported. There was no graduation rate available for this program. The comparison against other districts in Chisago County could not position this school because the core metrics—proficiency index, four-year graduation rate, and chronic absenteeism rate—were all absent. This absence is not unusual for an alternative learning program, since these settings often serve students with different academic pathways and may not participate in the same standardized testing and reporting structure as a traditional high school. A parent should understand that the lack of familiar metrics like test scores and graduation rates does not necessarily mean weak performance; it is a reflection of how data is captured for this type of program. Anyone considering this placement would want to discuss academic progress and completion expectations directly with the school staff.
The school’s enrollment was reported as zero across all four high school grades, with no data on race and ethnicity breakdowns, free-or-reduced-price lunch eligibility, special education, or English learner status. No program offerings were listed. No information about staffing, discipline, or course access was in the available data. The school environment section showed no locale classification, no attendance figures, and no details about its governance beyond the fact that it is not a charter school and its magnet status was not recorded.
The district that this program belongs to, Chisago Lakes School District, has a recent parent-relevant change. In November 2023, voters renewed the district’s expiring operating levy, which secures ongoing district revenue adjusted for inflation. However, a companion ballot question that would have provided dedicated annual funding for technology was defeated, leaving the district without that specific stream of revenue. This is a factual piece of information about the district’s financial situation that could matter to families thinking about how technology is supported across the district’s schools, including this alternative program.
Lindström itself has seen substantial population growth over the past two decades, and housing values have risen. The town is largely car-dependent, with most workers commuting by car alone, and the mean travel time to work is significant, pointing to commuters who work outside Lindström, likely toward the Twin Cities. The town’s civic anchors include City Hall, the Community Center, the public library, the surrounding lakes, and seasonal events like the Karl Oskar Days festival and summer concert series. No large private employers are headquartered in Lindström itself. These community characteristics provide context for the kind of setting a family would be living in, but the school’s own data is largely a blank slate in terms of conventional academic metrics.
A parent researching this school will find little in the way of numerical benchmarks to compare against traditional high schools. The alternative nature of the program likely shapes how it measures and records outcomes. Anyone evaluating this option for a student would be best served by contacting the program directly to understand its curriculum, graduation requirements, student support services, and how success is defined and tracked for its participants. The district’s broader financial picture, with a renewed operating levy but no new dedicated technology funding, is the one concrete institutional fact available beyond the school’s own reported data.
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