Original Research by School Decision on Watershed High School
Watershed High School is a small public charter school in Richfield serving grades nine through twelve. The school has decided to close at the conclusion of the 2025-2026 school year, and an enrollment freeze is already in effect, meaning no new students can enroll. For any family reading this, the school is not accepting new students and will no longer be operating after this school year ends.
The student body is small. The school draws from a mix of backgrounds, with roughly half the students identifying as white and the other half from a range of racial and ethnic groups, including Black and Hispanic students each making up a notable share. Just over half of students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, a common measure of household economic need. The four grade levels have uneven distribution, with the junior class the largest and the freshman and senior classes quite small.
On state assessments, the school reported results for a single recent year. In English language arts, no students met the proficiency standard. In math, a small share of students reached the proficiency bar. These results come from one year of data for a very small school, so they represent a snapshot rather than a trend. There is no graduation rate available in the data, nor information on chronic absenteeism or special education and English learner populations. A parent would want to ask the school directly about these topics, particularly how students with disabilities or language needs are served, and what the typical path to graduation looks like.
Richfield itself is a dense inner-ring suburb of Minneapolis, a postwar boom town whose population peaked decades ago and then declined due to airport and highway expansion. The city now focuses on redevelopment. Best Buy's corporate headquarters dominates the local economy. Housing values in the school's ZIP code sit very close to the statewide benchmark, with rents also near the state average, making it a middling-cost market relative to the rest of Minnesota. The community has a suburban street grid with a mix of single-family homes and apartments, an extensive park system, and a nature center.
The school board voted to close Watershed High School at the end of this school year. The decision and the accompanying enrollment freeze mean that current students must find another school for the following year, and families considering this school for the future will not have that option. The district brief publicly reports this closure and freeze as a settled matter. For anyone with a student currently enrolled, the immediate priority is working with the school and the broader Richfield area to secure a transfer to another school before the next academic year.
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