Original Research by School Decision on Highlands
Highlands is closed. A parent looking at Omak today will not find this school operating. It was an alternative school in the Omak School District serving a single grade, listed as M through M, which typically indicates a multi-grade or ungraded setting for older students. The school’s lifecycle status in the official data is “closed,” and the address—521 Grape Ave. E in Omak, Washington—is no longer an active school campus for this program.
Because Highlands is closed, there is no current enrollment, no student demographics, no state testing results, and no graduation rate to report. The only testing data on file comes from the school year ending in 2021, and those results are suppressed, meaning the number of students tested was too small to report publicly without risking identification. That is consistent with a small alternative program. For a school that served what was likely a small, specialized student population, routine academic metrics do not exist in any usable form.
What can be said about Highlands is limited to its type and its district context. It was an alternative school within the Omak School District, which serves the small city of Omak in north-central Washington. Omak is the largest municipality in Okanogan County and a regional hub with an economy rooted in agriculture, forestry, and sawmills, supplemented by recreational tourism and the presence of a Wenatchee Valley College campus. The city has a traditional main-street business district along US Route 97, with residential neighborhoods spreading outward, and the Okanogan River running through it. The district itself, based on a search for recent parent-relevant changes, had little that was publicly reported in a lasting way.
For a family researching schools in the Omak area, the key takeaway is that Highlands is not an option. The Omak School District operates other schools, and understanding what Highlands was—a closed alternative program that served a small, likely at-promise or non-traditional student body—helps clarify that it was not a standard comprehensive school. Any parent who came across Highlands in historical records would want to confirm that their child’s pathway leads to one of the district’s currently operating schools. The absence of testing data and the suppression of results mean there is no academic performance profile to judge, even for the time the school was open. That is a gap explained by the school’s nature: alternative schools often serve small numbers of students for whom standardized testing may not be the primary measure of progress. A parent with questions about what Highlands offered when it was active would need to contact the Omak School District directly for historical context. For current school planning, the focus should be on the district’s active elementary, middle, and high school programs.
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