Original Research by School Decision on Midway High School
Midway High School sits in Inkster, North Dakota, a tiny rural crossroads in Grand Forks County roughly thirty miles northwest of Grand Forks. The town itself is barely more than a cluster of homes and a post office, with a population that has been shrinking for over a century and now sits at a level low enough that the community reads more as a quiet residential outpost than a functioning town. There is no commercial corridor, no library, no public transit. Civic life centers on the post office and a small local airport, with Turtle River State Park about fifteen miles south offering the nearest outdoor recreation. Publicly reported sources note above-average flood risk in the area, which may constrain what development could happen here. For a family considering this school, the setting is rural in a very literal sense: widely spaced homes, minimal infrastructure, and the nearest real commercial and civic activity in Grand Forks.
The school is a regular public high school serving grades nine through twelve, part of the Midway 128 district. Enrollment is small even by rural North Dakota standards, with each grade level fitting in a single classroom. The student body is predominantly white, with a small Hispanic presence. A substantial share of students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch. Data on individualized education programs and English learner services was not available, so families whose children receive those supports will want to ask the school directly about what is in place.
Academic results from the most recent state assessments show a mixed picture. English language arts proficiency sits at a moderate level, with roughly half of students meeting the state bar. Math and science proficiency are both low, with only about a fifth of students proficient in each subject. Only a single year of data was available, so there is no trend to assess whether these numbers represent a dip, a plateau, or the school's typical performance. A parent looking at these results may want to understand from the school what supports are in place for math and science instruction, and how leadership is responding to those numbers.
No graduation rate was provided in the data, which is a gap families should fill directly. Course access information, staffing details, attendance figures, and discipline data were also absent from what was available, so the academic program beyond the test results cannot be characterized here. Program offerings such as Advanced Placement, career and technical education, or dual-credit pathways were not reported, and in a school this small, breadth of offerings is naturally limited. What a small school can offer is closeness: with fewer than a dozen students per grade, teachers likely know every student by name, and class sizes are intimate. Whether that environment suits a given teenager depends on the child. Some thrive with that visibility and personal attention. Others want a wider peer group, more course choices, and more extracurricular variety than a school of this size can sustain.
The district brief turned up no parent-relevant changes in the form of referendums, curriculum shifts, or program additions. No neighbor comparison was available to position Midway against surrounding districts in the county, so families have no benchmark from this dataset for how the school stacks up academically against nearby options.
What the picture amounts to is a very small rural high school in a contracting community, anchored in a tight-knit setting where students get individual attention but have limited program options. The academic data shows real weakness in math and science that a family should probe, alongside middling results in English. For parents already living in or near Inkster, the school is the local option and its small scale is a known trade-off. For anyone weighing a move here, the remoteness of the setting, the lack of nearby amenities, and the academic numbers are the factors most worth sitting with before deciding.
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