Summary:
Hill City Middle School is the only middle school serving Hill City Public School District, educating 83 students in grades 5 through 8. Because it is the sole middle school in the district, there is no peer school to compare it against locally; the meaningful comparisons are with the district overall and with Minnesota. The school community includes a high poverty indicator, with 55.42% of students qualifying for free or reduced lunch in 2024–2025, and a student-teacher ratio of 20.6. With only 83 students, each grade is a small cohort, so percentages can swing noticeably from one year to the next.
Academically, the school trails both the district and the state in every core subject. In 2025–2026, all-grade math proficiency was 6.3% at the school, compared with 12.5% in the district and 44.9% statewide. Reading stood at 26.3%, versus 31.3% district and 48.6% state, and science was 5.4%, versus 9.4% district and 25.5% state. Math shows the widest gap, at 38.6 percentage points below the state. Grade-level results vary: 8th grade recorded 0% proficiency in both math and science, with reading at 21.7%. The strongest result is 5th grade reading at 42.9%, though it still falls short of the state's 54.5% for that grade. Science is not listed for grades 6 and 7.
The school's statewide ranking has steadily declined, from the 24th percentile in 2023–2024, to the 19th percentile in 2024–2025, to the 8th percentile in 2025–2026, with its star rating dropping from 1 star to 0 stars. The district as a whole ranks 386th of 458 in Minnesota with 1 star, and the school's all-grade scores sit below even that district aggregate. Year over year, all-grade math fell from 17.95% to 6.3% and reading slipped from 29.49% to 26.3%, while science improved from 2.56% to 5.4% but remains very low. Parents should read these figures with the school's small size in mind: the patterns are consistent across subjects and grades, but individual year-to-year changes rest on small numbers of students.
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