Original Research by School Decision on Falcons Online Academy-hs
Falcons Online Academy-HS is the fully online high school option within the Faribault Public School District, serving grades nine through twelve. It is a regular public school, meaning it follows public school accountability standards, but it delivers instruction remotely rather than in a physical building. Its enrollment is small, with a distribution that tilts heavily toward upperclassmen: most students are in eleventh and twelfth grades, with a smaller number of freshmen and sophomores. The student body is predominantly white, with a substantial Black and Hispanic population and a small number of students who identify with two or more races; Asian, American Indian, and Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander students were not represented in the available count. A large majority of students come from households that qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, reflecting a high level of economic need among the families who choose this program.
The school’s academic performance data is essentially absent from public reporting. The state assessment results show a zero percent proficiency rate in both English language arts and math for the most recent testing year, but that single data point covers only one year and likely reflects a small testing cohort or a circumstance in which few students took the standard assessments. Because the school is an online program, many students may take alternative assessments or have participation patterns that make these results hard to interpret. There is no graduation rate available, no chronic absenteeism data, and no information on college readiness or career and technical education pathways. A parent looking to understand academic outcomes here will find no track record to evaluate. This is the central limitation of the school as an option: the public measures that typically help families compare high schools are missing entirely.
The school sits within Faribault, a city of steady growth along Interstate 35 about fifty miles south of the Twin Cities. Faribault has a historic downtown with local businesses, a manufacturing base that includes food processing and industrial employers, and several notable civic assets like a nature center and trail connections. The housing market in the area is moderately priced relative to the state and national benchmarks, and the 30-year fixed mortgage rate at the time of this report hovers around the national average. The broader district, Faribault Public Schools, operates a range of buildings across the city, including an early childhood center, multiple elementary schools, a middle school, the traditional high school, and the Area Learning Center. Falcons Online Academy-HS is one of several educational settings within that district.
What this school offers is a fully remote alternative for high school students, which may suit families who need flexible scheduling, who prefer learning from home, or who have found the traditional school environment a poor fit. It is not a school where academic performance is publicly documented, so a family cannot point to test scores or graduation rates as evidence of program quality. The school’s small size and heavy concentration of juniors and seniors suggest it may function partly as a credit-recovery or completion pathway for students who are closer to graduating. A parent considering this option would want to ask the school directly about course offerings, graduation requirements, student support services, and how the online instruction is structured. The available data offers no window into those details. The school is part of a district with a full set of traditional schools, so families who try the online option and find it lacking may have other choices within the same system. But the decision rests on information the public record does not supply.
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