Original Research by School Decision on Is the Alternative Program (tap)
IS THE ALTERNATIVE PROGRAM (TAP) sits inside the Wayzata Public School District and serves grades 9 through 12 as an alternative school. It is not a charter school. The school is located in Plymouth, a large, mature suburb roughly 10 miles west of downtown Minneapolis that evolved from a farming community into a suburban city over the mid-20th century. Plymouth’s built environment is highly car-dependent, with extensive cul-de-sac subdivisions and major highway corridors rather than a traditional walkable downtown. Five different school districts serve the city, and Wayzata High School, one of the largest in the state by enrollment, is the district’s main comprehensive high school. TAP shares an address with Wayzata Online, the district’s full-time online learning option for high school students established as a permanent programmatic choice after the pandemic.
A parent considering TAP will find very little conventional data to evaluate it on. The school reported a total enrollment of zero across all four high school grades, and no demographic breakdown of race, ethnicity, or special populations was provided beyond zeros. Federal free and reduced-price lunch counts were missing. Because the school is an alternative program, state testing data was not available, and no graduation rate was reported. We looked for course access, staffing ratios, attendance figures, and discipline data but found none. The comparison to other districts in Hennepin County was not applicable for proficiency, graduation rate, or chronic absenteeism because the school had no data for those metrics. This lack of conventional reporting is common for alternative and special-purpose schools, which often operate outside the standard accountability framework.
What is known is structural. TAP is part of the Wayzata district, which has a much larger public profile. The district passed an operating levy renewal in 2023 that extended funding by roughly a decade for class sizes, academic programs, and staff. Wayzata Public Schools has been managing enrollment growth, adding a 10th elementary school as part of capacity planning, and total district enrollment exceeds a total that makes it one of the larger systems in the state. The district also maintains a single comprehensive high school, so TAP functions as a separate pathway within the same district for students whose needs are not met in the large high school setting.
Plymouth itself is a mature suburb that has been largely built out, with a slight population decline noted in a 2022 estimate compared to the 2020 census. The housing market is expensive, with a price-to-income ratio well above the national level, and rents are similarly high. The city’s major employers span insurance, education, telecommunications, and medical devices, and the employer base gives the area a stable economic foundation. Civic anchors like the Plymouth Community Center, Hilde Performance Center, and the Luce Line Trail provide parks and recreation amenities.
For a family looking at TAP, the key question is what the program actually offers, and the publicly available data does not answer that in a standardized way. The school is listed as an alternative school serving grades 9 through 12, but no description of its academic focus, therapeutic model, or credit recovery structure was present in the data we received. A parent would need to contact the school or the Wayzata district directly to understand the program’s approach to instruction, its graduation requirements, and the population it is designed to serve. The absence of test scores and graduation rates here is almost certainly a function of the school’s alternative nature rather than a negative, but it does mean there is no comparative academic track record to weigh against the district’s larger high school. This school fits a family that already knows what TAP offers and how it works, not one looking to compare it against a conventional high school on typical measures.
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