Original Research by School Decision on Swmetro Freedom Academy Level 4
SWMetro Freedom Academy Level 4 is listed on its state directory as a "future" special education school serving grade M through M, an unlabeled or middle-grade span. It belongs to Southwest Metro Intermediate 288, an intermediate district in Minnesota that provides specialized educational services—including special education, alternative learning, and career and technical programs—to eleven member school districts. The school is not a charter school.
The data the state and federal systems collect for this school is mostly absent, and that absence itself is the most important thing for a parent to understand. No enrollment count, no demographic breakdown, no count of students with Individualized Education Programs or English learner status, no staffing data, no discipline data, no course access data, and no attendance data are available in this record. State testing results, which are the common checkpoint for academic performance, are not reported here. No four-year graduation rate appears. The comparison tool that would place this school against districts in Wright County was not applicable for any of its metrics—proficiency, graduation rate, or chronic absenteeism—because the school did not have the baseline data to be compared.
The reason a school like this may have no testing results is straightforward: as a special education school, its student population and the services it provides often sit outside the standard state accountability testing framework. That is not a mark of weakness or evasion; it reflects the specialized, individualized nature of the program. A parent looking at this school would want to contact Southwest Metro Intermediate 288 directly for a full picture: what specific grades and disability categories the school serves, what the daily academic and therapeutic structure looks like, what staff-to-student ratios are, and what outcomes the school tracks for its graduates, since conventional state metrics do not capture its work.
The school's location is the town of Waverly, a small lakeside community on Big Waverly Lake roughly thirty-five miles west of the Twin Cities. Waverly has seen substantial residential growth, with multiple subdivisions platted over the past two decades and a population that has increased considerably after many earlier decades of decline. The town remains small and describes itself as poised for continued growth with a small-town character. U.S. Highway 12 is the main route through town. The city offices and the historic Village Hall, a former WPA project listed on the National Register of Historic Places, anchor the compact civic core. Housing values in the area are near the state median and just below the national benchmark, with modest year-over-year appreciation.
The intermediate district that operates this school, Southwest Metro Intermediate 288, does not appear in the search results to have made any parent-relevant changes in recent years that would shape a family's decision. It functions as a consortium that brings together resources from multiple member districts to run programs none of them could sustain alone. A parent assessing this school should ask the district directly for the specific programs Freedom Academy Level 4 offers, what educational and behavioral framework it uses, and what the transition supports look like for students who return to their home district or move on to postsecondary options. The available public record provides the outline of a specialized special education setting in a growing small-town community but leaves nearly every operational detail for the family to uncover in conversation with the district.
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