Original Research by School Decision on Burnsville Area Learning Center
Burnsville Area Learning Center is an alternative school serving grades six through twelve and is part of the Burnsville-Eagan-Savage Schools district. For the family considering this school, the most important context is its identity as an alternative program, a type of school that typically serves students who have not found success in a conventional classroom setting, whether due to academic, behavioral, or personal circumstances. The data we have is thin, but that thinness itself is informative about what this school is.
Because this is an alternative school, the conventional benchmarks that many parents use to judge a school are either absent or not applicable in the way they would be for a traditional school. We looked for state assessment results in math, reading, and science. For the one year of data available, results were suppressed for all subjects at all grade levels. This is standard practice when the number of test-takers is very small, as it often is in an alternative setting where the student body is not large and where the mission is not to produce a full battery of standardized scores. A parent looking for a proficiency bar chart will not find one here.
Similarly, we looked for a graduation rate and found none. An alternative school of this type may have a graduation pathway that does not align neatly with a standard four-year cohort, or the grade bands served may not produce a single, reportable rate. In either case, the absence does not mean the school fails to graduate students; it means the standard metric does not capture the work done here.
The enrollment data shows a total of zero students, which is almost certainly a reporting lag or a data error rather than a true reflection of the school. The practical takeaway is that this is a small program by design, serving a niche population. We have no information on the demographic composition, the share of students receiving special education services, or the share of English learners. The housing context for Burnsville, the city the school sits in, is that of a developed suburban community. The area is largely built out, with recent development focused on redevelopment projects rather than new greenfield growth. Home values and rents are positioned near the middle of the metro area, making it a middle-market suburb. The district has recently made changes that affect families across the system: it established a permanent K-12 virtual academy, One91 Virtual Academy, and it reduced the number of its elementary schools from ten to eight, including the closure of Marion W. Savage Elementary. These changes matter most for families with younger children, but they speak to a district operating under funding constraints and adjusting its footprint.
For the parent reading this, the central question is not whether Burnsville Area Learning Center has high test scores. It almost certainly does not in any conventional sense, and if that is what you are looking for, this is not the place. The school exists for a different purpose: to re-engage students who have struggled, to offer a smaller, more flexible environment, and to provide an alternative path toward a diploma. If your child is not thriving in a traditional school and needs a different structure, this is the kind of program worth investigating directly. Call the school. Ask about the size of the current enrollment, the specific academic pathways it offers, how it supports students who are behind in credits, and what the graduation or completion numbers look like for recent years. The data we have does not answer those questions, but the school itself can.
See more original research from School Decision →