The top reported proficiency rate is 0% in Math.
Original Research by School Decision on North Star High School
North Star High School serves a small, rural community in the Hi-Line region of Montana, drawing students from Rudyard and the surrounding wheat-farming towns of Hingham, Gildford, and Kremlin. The school is the high school arm of the North Star Public School district, located in Rudyard itself. Rudyard is an unincorporated community with a stable population over recent decades, a compact layout, and a handful of civic anchors such as the Depot Museum and the Hi-Line Vintage Motors Museum. U.S. Route 2 runs along the southern edge of town. Amtrak’s Empire Builder passes through but does not stop; the nearest station is about forty miles east in Havre. The local economy is driven primarily by wheat farming, with the school district itself an institutional employer. Housing in the area is notably affordable compared to state and national benchmarks.
North Star High School enrolls a small number of students across grades nine through twelve. The student body is predominantly white, with smaller shares of students identifying as two or more races, Hispanic, American Indian or Alaska Native, and Black. Roughly half of the student body qualifies for free or reduced-price lunch, reflecting the economic makeup of the area. The school is not a charter or magnet school, and Title I status was not reported.
When it comes to academic performance, the available data is thin. State testing results for high school subjects were not provided in the data we have, so it is not possible to characterize how students perform on the Smarter Balanced assessments at North Star High School. The graduation rate was also not available. A parent looking for standardized test scores or a four-year completion rate will find neither in the current record; this may be worth following up with the school or district directly. The only proficiency metric that appeared in the data was drawn from grades three through eight, which does not apply to this high school, so it offers no signal about the academic environment for ninth through twelfth graders.
Program offerings—such as Advanced Placement, dual credit, or career and technical education pathways—were also absent from the data. There is no public record of which courses or pathways the school makes available. The district brief did not turn up recent changes or initiatives. The school sits within a county with a dozen school districts, but without comparable high school assessment or graduation data, it is difficult to position North Star relative to its neighbors on academic grounds.
What can be said is that North Star High School functions as a small, rural high school in a stable agricultural community. The enrollment is modest, which typically allows for close relationships between students and staff, though staffing data was not included. The community is walkable in scale and lacks the amenities of a larger town or city. Families considering the school should weigh the tight-knit setting and affordable housing against the lack of published academic metrics and course offerings. Without more complete data, the school remains something of an unknown on the quantitative side, and the best next step for a prospective parent would be to reach out to the school directly for a fuller picture.
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