Original Research by School Decision on Highland Park Senior High
Highland Park Senior High, located in Saint Paul’s Highland Park neighborhood, is a regular public high school within the Saint Paul Public Schools district. It serves ninth through twelfth grade and has a large enrollment for a high school, with students fairly evenly distributed across all four grade levels. The school is not a charter and its magnet status is not reported.
Academic proficiency data is available from the 2024-25 school year, the only year provided. Across all tested grades and subjects, a majority of Highland Park’s students met proficiency standards in English language arts, while the share falling below that mark is notable. In math, the proficiency rate is lower, with fewer than half of students meeting the bar. These figures offer a single snapshot, with no trend data to show improvement or decline, so a parent may want to discuss current academic support and intervention strategies directly with the school. Because no comparison data for the school was available in the provided metrics, it is not possible to position Highland Park relative to other high schools in Ramsey County on these outcomes.
The student body is diverse. White students form the largest single group, followed by Hispanic, Black, and Asian students, with smaller shares identifying as two or more races, American Indian or Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander. Just under half of students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, indicating that a substantial share of families have lower household incomes. The school did not report counts for students with Individualized Education Programs (IEPs) or English learners, so those profiles are not part of this picture. The school also did not provide data on chronic absenteeism, discipline, staffing ratios, or course access, which limits what can be said about the school environment.
Highland Park is part of Saint Paul Public Schools, which in recent years has added new specialized magnet pathways. The district opened E-STEM Middle School, a magnet focused on environmental STEM, and converted Jackson Elementary into the East African Elementary Magnet, a culturally-focused option. It also renamed Ramsey Middle School to Hidden River Middle School. These changes signal a district that is actively reshaping its offerings at the elementary and middle levels, though no parallel changes for Highland Park itself were reported.
The school sits within the city of Saint Paul, Minnesota’s capital and second-largest city, which forms the eastern half of the Twin Cities metro area. Saint Paul is a city of diverse, well-established neighborhoods, with state government as the dominant employer and strong cultural anchors including the Science Museum of Minnesota and the Ordway Center. The Highland Park neighborhood itself is known for being somewhat more residential and family-oriented than some other parts of the city. Housing values in the school’s zip code are moderately above the state benchmark, and rents are roughly in line with what a median-income household can afford nationally, though the area’s overall housing market, like much of the Twin Cities, has seen steady appreciation.
A parent considering Highland Park will find a large, diverse high school where a majority of students meet English language arts standards, while math proficiency is an area where the school’s performance is more mixed. The lack of reported data on special education enrollment, English learner services, discipline, and staffing means those aspects of the school’s environment would need to be explored directly. The district is making changes to its magnet and school identity landscape, particularly at lower grade levels, but how that feeds into Highland Park remains an open question. For a family that values a large urban school with a broad cross-section of the city’s population, Highland Park presents a defined academic picture with known strengths and known soft spots, both of which are worth investigating further in a visit or conversation with the school.
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