Summary:
Cass Lake-Bena Public Schools is a small district in northern Minnesota with two high schools: Cass Lake-Bena Secondary, which serves grades 9–12 with 263 students, and Cass Lake-Bena Area Learning Cntr., which serves grades 7–12 with 94 students. Together they enroll 357 high-school students. The district ranks 425th of 458 in Minnesota, at the 7th percentile, with 0 district stars.
The two schools have noticeably different profiles. Cass Lake-Bena Secondary has the higher graduation rate, 75.0% versus 35.2% at the Area Learning Center, and also leads in reading proficiency (26.7% vs. 13.3%) and science (4.8% vs. 0%). The Area Learning Center has the higher math proficiency, 10% versus 2.5%, and the lower dropout rate, 8.8% versus 12.5%. Both serve high-poverty populations, with free/reduced lunch rates of 75.67% at the Secondary and 79.79% at the Area Learning Center, and both have similar student-teacher ratios, 11.7 and 11.9.
Compared with Minnesota as a whole, both schools trail well behind state benchmarks. Statewide, 44.9% of students are proficient in math, 48.6% in reading, and 25.5% in science, while the state graduation rate is 84.9% and the dropout rate 4.2%. The district reports 13.7% in math, 22.1% in reading, and 5.6% in science, and each school sits below even those district figures in most subjects. Rank history shows a modest uptick at the Secondary, from 428 of 450, 5th percentile and 0 stars in 2024–2025 to 421 of 473, 11th percentile and 1 star in 2025–2026. The Area Learning Center sat at 447 of 450, 1st percentile, 0 stars in 2024–2025, with no 2025–2026 rank listed. Note that some Area Learning Center grade-level test scores are suppressed by the state, so those values are unknown rather than zero.
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