Pine City Public School District

Three schools serve roughly 1,568 students in the Pine City Public School District in Minnesota: Pine City Elementary (PK–6, 863 students), Pine City Secondary (grades 7–12, 683 students), and the very small Pine City Area Learning Center (grades 9–12, 22 students). The district reports no separate middle school, but Pine City Secondary serves middle grades alongside high schoolers. Overall, the district is rated 3 stars, ranking 230 of 458 Minnesota districts, at the 50th percentile.

Comparing the schools, Pine City Secondary has the strongest completion results: a 91.5% graduation rate and 2.8% dropout rate, both better than the district (83.3% and 3.1%) and the state (84.9% and 4.2%). Its weakness is science — 15.2% all-grade proficiency versus the state's 25.5%, and 8th-grade science at 8.2%. Pine City Elementary has held 2 stars at roughly the 38th percentile; its brightest spot is 5th-grade reading at 55.4%, just above the state's 54.5%, while 4th-grade reading is 28.4% against the state's 48.8%. Elementary science rose from 15.04% to 24.3%. The Area Learning Center has a 36.8% graduation rate, a 5.2% dropout rate, and the highest free/reduced lunch rate at 59.09%; its current test proficiency values are suppressed by the state, so they are unknown, not zero.

Staffing differs too: Pine City Secondary has the highest student-teacher ratio at 19.2, compared with 15.0 at the Elementary school and 16.5 at the Area Learning Center. Poverty indicators track with outcomes, with the lowest free/reduced lunch rate (36.02%) at the school with the strongest completion results and the highest (59.09%) at the school with the weakest. Science remains a district-wide weakness, with district proficiency at 18.2% against the state's 25.5%.