Summary:
Harvest Best Academy is a small district of two K–8 schools in north Minneapolis — Best Academy (508 students) and the online Wakanda Virtual Academy Lower (282 students) — which together enroll 790 children and share the same address on Olson Memorial Highway. Both are elementary schools serving kindergarten through eighth grade, and the district totals reported for Harvest Best Academy combine these two campuses.
Compared with each other, Wakanda Virtual Academy Lower has the stronger reading results: it outperformed Best Academy in reading at every grade level, posting 30.6% proficiency overall versus 22.0%. Its 8th grade reading score of 43.8% was the highest single result in the district and came within about 6 points of the state average of 50%. Math is much closer — 10.0% overall at Wakanda versus 9.3% at Best — and Best Academy actually came out ahead in three of the six grade-level math comparisons, including 8th grade (11.1% versus 6.3%).
Both schools score well below state averages (44.9% in math, 48.6% in reading, 25.5% in science) and both declined from the previous year in every subject, with math dropping roughly 9 to 13 points at each campus. The clearest shared weakness is science: no 8th grader at either school reached proficiency, compared with 16.7% statewide, and 5th grade science was 7.5% at Best and 6.3% at Wakanda against 25.9% statewide. About nine in ten students at both schools qualify for free or reduced-price lunch. In state rankings, Best Academy placed in the 6th percentile and Wakanda Virtual Academy Lower in the 10th percentile, both with zero stars, so families should expect meaningful variation from grade to grade and between the two campuses.
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