The top reported proficiency rate is 29% in English language arts. The lowest is 3% in Science.
Original Research by School Decision on Swanville Elementary
Swanville Elementary serves the town of Swanville, a very small rural community in central Minnesota set in a valley near Pepin Lake and known for turkey production. The school is the elementary wing of the district’s single PK-12 building, located right in town at 602 Degraff Avenue, so students in early grades share a campus with older peers. The district is classified as Rural, Remote by the NCES, and the elementary school serves prekindergarten through sixth grade with a modest enrollment.
The student body is predominantly White, with a notable Hispanic population and a small share of students who identify as two or more races. Just under half of students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, a rate that aligns with the economic context of a town where home values run well below the national median and the local economy rests on agriculture, small manufacturing at the industrial park, and the school itself as an employer. A family moving here should expect a peer environment that is fairly homogeneous racially but not economically uniform.
State testing data for the 2024-25 school year is available for math, reading, and science. In math, proficiency rates across grades three through six show a wide spread; one grade level reaches above the state midpoint while others fall substantially below it. Reading proficiency rates are generally below the state average across the same grade span. In fifth-grade science, the share of students scoring proficient is very low. The school’s overall proficiency index, which averages performance across all tested subjects and grades, places Swanville Elementary in the bottom quartile relative to districts in Morrison County. This is a straightforward signal for a parent: academic attainment here is lower than in most neighboring districts, and a family should expect that the school is working from a different performance baseline than schools in more affluent or higher-scoring parts of the county.
Because Swanville Elementary does not serve high school grades, there is no graduation rate to report. The school’s primary academic program is its general elementary curriculum; the data does not indicate any specialized offerings, magnet themes, or advanced coursework at this grade band. A parent looking for a school with strong test results across the board would need to weigh this performance picture carefully.
On the community side, Swanville is a compact, car-dependent town where most residents commute to work by driving alone. The downtown has seen business improvement efforts, and the school itself recently received voter approval for a significant bond referendum in February 2025 that will fund facility expansion and improvements with construction starting in summer 2026. That vote represents a clear community commitment to the school building and signals that the district is investing in its physical plant for the long term.
The data does not include information on staffing ratios, chronic absenteeism, discipline rates, or course access, so those are gaps a parent may want to explore directly with the school. Swanville Elementary is a small rural school with a plainly lower academic performance profile than its county peers, serving a community that has chosen to invest in its facility even as the town’s population has declined slightly. It may fit a family seeking a very small, locally grounded elementary experience in a remote setting, but the test results and comparative position are what they are.
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