Summary:
Tower, Minnesota has exactly one high school in this data set — Vermilion Country School — a small school serving grades 7–12 with 50 students. It is also listed as its own district, Vermilion Country School, so the district-level numbers are identical to the school-level numbers. Because there is only one school, there is nothing to compare it against locally; the useful comparison is against state averages.
The school's profile combines high need with a low student-teacher ratio: 80% of students qualified for free/reduced lunch in 2024–2025, and the student-teacher ratio was 9.2. Rankings have been volatile — 16th percentile with 1 star in 2016–2017, 49th percentile with 2 stars in 2018–2019, and 21st percentile with 1 star in 2025–2026 (374 of 473). Completion outcomes look better than academics in the one year with school-level data: 92.3% graduation and 0.0% dropout in 2023–2024, though 2024–2025 school-level values were suppressed. Test scores lag the state. All-grade Math was 0% proficient in both 2024–2025 and 2025–2026, against state rates near 45%. All-grade Reading rose from 11.11% to 22.7%, still below the state's 48.6%; 10th-grade Reading was 31.3% versus 42.5%. All-grade Science was 16.1% versus 25.5%, and End-of-Course Science was 16.7% versus 35%.
Two cautions matter for parents reading this. First, many grade-level test values are marked "—" because the state suppressed them to protect student privacy; those results are unknown, not zero. Second, with only 50 students, a single student can move a percentage by several points, so year-to-year changes are noisy and should be read as directional rather than definitive. The clearest signals are the two consecutive all-grade Math results at 0% proficiency, the drop from the 2018–2019 ranking peak, and the positive graduation and dropout figures in the one year of available school-level data.
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