Summary:
Four high schools serve the city of Austin, Minnesota — three in the Austin Public School District and one in the Southern MN Education Consortium — enrolling 1,838 students in total across grade spans from 5 to 12, and combining comprehensive, alternative, online, and consortium settings. Austin Senior High enrolls 1,485 students, about 81% of the group, while Austin Area Learning Center (172), Austin Online Academy (111), and Smec Alternative Learning Center (70) are much smaller, so many comparisons are not perfectly apples-to-apples.
Austin Senior High is the only school here with a current 2-star rating, climbing from the 25th percentile in 2023–24 to the 38th percentile in 2025–26. Its Science score of 27.7% proficient tops both the district's 13% and the state's 25.5%, but Math (23.6%) and Reading (32.9%) trail state levels, and its 81.2% graduation rate sits below the state's 84.9% while its 11.8% dropout rate is well above the state's 4.2%. Smec Alternative Learning Center posts the strongest graduation profile — 87.1% graduation and 0.0% dropout, above its district and the state — plus the lowest student–teacher ratio at 14.0, but its academic test scores are suppressed, so its proficiency cannot be judged here.
Austin Online Academy is the most uneven: Reading is 38.5% proficient, above the district's 33.7% but below the state's 48.6%, and it has the lowest free/reduced-lunch rate at 36.04%, yet Math (8.3%) and Science (7.7%) are weak and its 73.8% graduation rate trails district and state. Austin Area Learning Center has the lowest current outcomes — 469 of 473, 1st percentile, 0 stars, with Math 1.3%, Reading 1.6%, and Science 0% — along with the highest free/reduced-lunch rate (69.19%) and student–teacher ratio (35.3); its latest prior graduation rate, from 2022–23, was 33.3%. The Austin Public School District itself ranks 388th of 458 statewide, at the 15th percentile with 1 star.
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