Original Research by School Decision on Dilworth-glyndon-felton Alp
Dilworth-Glyndon-Felton ALP is an alternative high school serving grades nine through twelve in Glyndon, Minnesota. It is part of the Dilworth-Glyndon-Felton school district. The school’s enrollment is very small, and its student body is made up mostly of white students, with a modest share of Hispanic students and a handful of students of two or more races. A substantial majority of students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, which is a common indicator of economic need in the community.
The school sits in Glyndon, a small, mainly residential rural town along U.S. Highway 10, roughly ten miles east of the Fargo-Moorhead metro area. Glyndon functions as a bedroom community for that larger metro, and its population has grown modestly in recent years. The town’s largest employer is the school district itself; other employers are very small businesses such as a Tastee Freez, a Cenex station, and a sanitation service. Most working residents likely commute westward to Fargo-Moorhead. The built environment is a traditional small-town grid with single-family homes, civic buildings, and scattered businesses rather than a dense commercial corridor. There is no local public transit, and Amtrak passes through without stopping.
Because Dilworth-Glyndon-Felton ALP is an alternative school, the standard academic accountability measures that apply to traditional public high schools may not fit the same way. The state testing data that is available shows a reported zero percent proficiency in both English language arts and math for the single school year on record. The data system flagged that this metric was not used for comparison against other districts in Clay County, and the school was not included in that comparison because of its alternative status. No multi-year trend exists; only a single year of results was reported. A parent interested in the academic program should look into this further with the school, because proficiency rates alone do not capture the full picture for an alternative setting, where students may enter with different academic histories and may be working toward different goals.
Graduation rate data was not available, and neither were chronic absenteeism rates, discipline records, staffing counts, or course access information. These gaps are common for small alternative schools, which are often not included in the same reporting frameworks as traditional schools. The school’s civil rights data was also not provided. Without these measures, a family considering this school would need to reach out directly to understand graduation outcomes, student support, and day-to-day operations.
The housing market in the Glyndon area is moderately priced relative to the national median, with home values having risen gradually in recent years. Rents are somewhat less expensive than the estimated monthly mortgage cost, which may matter for families weighing where to live. The 30-year fixed mortgage rate at the time of this data sits near the higher end of what has been typical over the past year.
For a family or student looking at Dilworth-Glyndon-Felton ALP, the key takeaway is that this is a very small alternative school within a rural district. It likely serves students who benefit from a nontraditional academic environment, whether due to credit recovery, flexible scheduling, or a need for smaller class sizes. The available data is thin, and most of a family’s evaluation will need to come from direct conversation with school staff and from visiting the campus. The community itself is quiet, commuter-oriented, and growing slowly, with limited commercial amenities but proximity to the larger Fargo-Moorhead metro.
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