Original Research by School Decision on Reset
RESET is a special education school serving students in grades one through twelve. It is run under the Southern MN Education Consortium, a cooperative that typically provides specialized programming for students whose needs are not met in a traditional classroom setting. The school enrolls a very small group of students, which is characteristic of a school that focuses on students with identified disabilities. A large majority of those students come from households that qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, and the student body is predominantly white, with a notable share of students who identify as two or more races, and a few Black and Hispanic students.
Because of the school's nature and its small size, most conventional academic performance measures are not available. State assessment results in math, reading, and science are suppressed for every tested grade, simply because so few students took the tests that reporting a rate would risk identifying individuals. This is standard practice for a school of this type, and it means that the kind of proficiency data that drives comparisons for regular schools does not apply here. No graduation rate is reported either, and no information on chronic absenteeism, discipline, or course access was available in the data. A parent considering this school would want to speak directly with the administration about academic progress, postsecondary transition supports, and how students are assessed for growth outside of the state testing system.
RESET is located just outside Austin, the seat of Mower County and a mid-sized industrial city anchored by Hormel Foods. The local economy is built around food processing, manufacturing, and healthcare, with a population that has been relatively stable over the past several years. Housing values in the area are lower than the state average, and rents have risen recently. The city has a compact downtown with civic institutions, parks, and a community college, but the school itself sits on a state highway a short distance from the town center, more rural in setting. For a family new to the area, this is not a school tied to a neighborhood attendance zone; it is a program that students are placed into through special education evaluation and placement processes.
The lack of a district brief or strategic priorities means there is no public account of recent changes or initiatives at the consortium level. The picture of RESET that emerges is one of a small, targeted program serving a specific population of students with disabilities, using an alternative setting within a regional cooperative. Standard metrics do not capture its work, and a family evaluating this school would need to rely on conversations with the sending district and the school itself to understand the curriculum, therapy services, and transition planning available. For the broader school community, this is not a school whose academic performance is publicly comparable, and it should not be read as either high or low performing in the typical sense. It is a specialized placement, and the data reflects that.
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