The reported proficiency rate for Science is 17%.
Original Research by School Decision on Laporte Secondary
Laporte Secondary is the sole high school for the Laporte Public School District, serving grades nine through twelve in one building located at the heart of this tiny, fully rural community in Hubbard County. The school sits on Garfield Lake, about a short drive south of Bemidji, in a place that functions largely as a quiet lakeside settlement, a retirement destination, and a trail stop on the Paul Bunyan Trail. The school itself is the central institution of the town, and the enrollment is small, reflecting both the community’s size and its slow population growth. A substantial share of students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, and the student body is predominantly white, with a noticeable share of students who identify as two or more races and a small number who are American Indian or Alaska Native. Data on students with disabilities and English learners was not available in the provided records.
Academically, the picture comes with a clear soft spot. The school’s proficiency rates on state assessments sit below the midpoint among the four districts in Hubbard County. In math, roughly a fifth of students were proficient in the most recent testing year, and in English language arts, just under half met that bar. The only science testing data available is from a prior year and shows a proficiency rate around a sixth of students. These are the school’s own results, and they are low compared to the county median. A parent considering this school would want to look into what academic supports and interventions the school offers. The data does not show whether these rates have been stable or trending, because the record has only a single year of data for each subject, so there is no trend line to assess.
The school follows a regular public school model and is not a charter or magnet school. No information was provided about course offerings, including Advanced Placement, career and technical education, or dual-credit programs, so a family interested in those pathways would need to ask the school directly what is available. The same gap applies to disciplinary data, staffing ratios, and attendance or chronic absenteeism rates; those fields were absent from the record, which may reflect the school’s small size or reporting patterns. A graduation rate was not reported either, though for a school of this size serving a complete high school grade span, that is a notable omission a family would want clarified.
The community context reinforces the school’s intimate scale. Laporte itself has a very small population, with most residents owning their homes, and the housing stock consists of older single-family homes with modest appreciation tied to regional lake-country demand rather than active new development. The school district is the largest local employer. Life is quiet and rural, organized around the lake, the city park, and the paved recreational trail that runs through town. The school is embedded in this fabric, not separated on a campus, so students live within walking distance of the building and the town’s thin strip of basic services.
For a family, this is a school that fits a very specific profile. If you want a small, rural high school where the building is the community’s anchor, where your child will be in a small peer group in a town with no industrial or commercial bustle, and where the academic data shows room for improvement, Laporte Secondary is the kind of place that delivers that straightforwardly. The academic proficiency numbers are the main concern, and they are not strong relative to the county. Whether that reflects the school’s programming, the community’s demographics, or other factors is not something the data alone answers, so asking the school directly about its instructional strategies, student supports, and any recent improvement efforts would be the next step. What you get here is a clear, unadorned picture of a small rural school in a very small town, with test scores that are below the local average and many other details left unreported.
See more original research from School Decision →