Summary:
The New London-Spicer School District — a 5-star district ranked 45th of 458 in Minnesota — includes two high schools serving grades 9–12 at the same New London address, with 460 students combined: New London-Spicer Senior (448 students) and New London Alternative School (12 students).
New London-Spicer Senior is the district's academic engine and a top-decile school statewide, climbing from 110th to 34th of 473 Minnesota high schools (93rd percentile, 5 stars). Math tells a striking one-year story: proficiency jumped from 36.19% to 57.6%, moving from below the state (45.21%) to above it (44.9%). Reading, at 54.7%, is the only subject where the school trails its own district (55.6%) and the only one that slipped, down 5.7 points — though it still beats the state's 48.6% by 6.1 points. Science is its signature: 49% proficient against the state's 25.5%, nearly double, and 18.1 points above the district's 30.9%. Graduation is 94.9%, ten points above the state's 84.9%. One caveat: "All Grades" results match a single grade per subject, so these are effectively single-cohort numbers rather than broad averages.
New London Alternative School operates at a very different scale. Its free/reduced lunch rate is 33.33% versus 19.87% at the Senior high — roughly 1.7 times the poverty rate — while its student-teacher ratio of 10.5 is about 30% lower than the Senior high's 14.7. All of its test scores are suppressed by the state, and no graduation or dropout figures are provided, so its academic performance is simply unknown; suppression at this size is expected by design, not a sign of low performance. For families, the takeaway is that the district's highly ranked results rest overwhelmingly on New London-Spicer Senior, a strong choice with standout science and a dramatic math rebound, watched mainly for its reading dip. The New London Alternative School is a small, higher-need, well-staffed program whose outcomes are not visible in this data.
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