Original Research by School Decision on Learning by Design Academy
Learning by Design Academy is a public charter school in Twin Lakes, Wisconsin, serving students from prekindergarten through eighth grade. It is one of the schools within the Twin Lakes #4 School District, and its charter status means it operates with a degree of autonomy from the district’s standard policies, though the extent of that independence is not detailed in the available records. The school is classified as a regular school, not an alternative or special-purpose program.
The student body is very small. The academy’s enrollment is modest in the context of a grade band that spans ten years of schooling. About a third of students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch. The racial and ethnic composition is predominantly white, with a small Hispanic representation. Information on the share of students receiving special education services or classified as English learners was not available.
Because the school’s enrollment count is low, Wisconsin’s state assessment results for eighth-grade math, English language arts, science, and social studies are all suppressed. This is a common practice when the number of test-takers is too small to report without risking individual student identification. As a result, there is no publicly reported measure of how students at Learning by Design Academy perform on the state’s Forward exam. A parent looking for standardized proficiency data will not find it here and would need to ask the school directly about its academic performance.
The school does not serve high school grades, so there is no graduation rate to report. The two grade-level rows in the academic data are both from eighth grade; the younger grades are not tested by the state at those levels. That absence does not signal a weakness—it simply reflects the grade range of the school and the state’s testing schedule.
Learning by Design Academy is located in the village of Twin Lakes, close to the Illinois border in western Kenosha County. Twin Lakes is a primarily residential and recreational community centered on two glacial lakes, Mary and Elizabeth. The population includes a mix of permanent residents and seasonal homeowners, and roughly a third of the housing stock is used for vacation purposes. The lakes anchor community life, with boat launches, lake management districts, and seasonal events such as the Country Thunder music festival. The village has invested in recent civic infrastructure: a new Village Hall opened in 2022, a new police department was built a few years earlier, and the sewer plant received major upgrades in 2023. The built environment is low-density and auto-oriented, and street life is likely seasonal.
The district that houses the academy, Twin Lakes #4 School District, has faced financial and academic pressures. Voters defeated three recurring referendum questions between 2024 and 2025, each seeking additional operational funding. The district responded with budget reductions that included staffing cuts, program reductions, and increased student fees. Separately, the district’s state accountability rating fell from “Meets Expectations” in 2021–22 to “Meets Few Expectations” in the two most recent report cards (2022–23 and 2023–24). That decline has persisted and signals a sustained challenge at the district level. How those district-wide constraints affect Learning by Design Academy specifically—whether its charter status shields it from some of the cuts or leaves it subject to the same budget pressures—is not spelled out in the available data. A family considering the school may want to ask about its funding, staffing, and program stability in light of the district’s recent referenda outcomes.
The academy’s very small size is its most defining characteristic. For a family seeking an environment with a low student-to-teacher ratio and the potential for personalized attention, that scale may be appealing. The trade-off is limited public information on academic outcomes, no extracurricular or course-access data in the record, and a district context of financial strain. The data does not include any program offerings, staffing numbers, or discipline figures, so the picture is incomplete by design. Learning by Design Academy is a real choice for families in the Twin Lakes area who value a small, charter-operated setting within a district navigating both fiscal and academic headwinds, but the thin public record means answers to many practical questions will have to come from the school itself.
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