Summary:
The Lake of the Woods School District in Baudette, Minnesota, is a small district with just two schools serving about 462 students in total: Lake of the Woods Elementary, which covers pre-kindergarten through 5th grade with 234 students, and Lake of the Woods Secondary, which serves grades 6 through 12 with 228 students. There is no separate middle school, so the secondary school combines middle and high school grades. The district ranks 330th of 458 Minnesota districts, in the 28th percentile with a 1-star rating, and both schools scored below the state average in math, reading, and science in 2025–2026.
The two schools have different strengths and struggles. The elementary school improved slightly in reading but saw proficiency fall in math and science, with science at only 4.3% versus the state's 25.5%. Its math results drop sharply by grade, from 44.7% in 3rd grade to 28.9% in 4th and just 4.3% in 5th, while 5th-grade reading at 52.2% was close to the state's 54.5%. The secondary school is moving in the other direction: its rank percentile rose from 17th to 29th, math proficiency climbed from 25.38% to 32.3%, and science rose from 15% to 18.2%. Its 2024–2025 graduation rate of 89.4% beat the state's 84.9%, and 8th-grade science at 16.1% nearly matched the state's 16.7%.
Still, the secondary school's reading proficiency fell from 41.27% to 34.4%, with 7th-grade reading at 25.0% and 10th-grade reading at 20.8%, both far below state levels. Its dropout rate of 7.8% is also well above the state's 4.2%. Because each grade has relatively few students, percentages can shift by several points from a handful of students, so single-year changes are worth watching closely.
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