Summary:
The St. Cloud Public School District includes two middle schools serving grades 6 through 8 — South Junior High, with 831 students, and North Junior High, with 720 students — for a combined 1,551 middle schoolers. The district itself ranks 363 of 458 Minnesota districts, at the 21st percentile with 1 star, so both schools sit within a district-wide pattern of low proficiency relative to the state.
South Junior High is the stronger of the two overall: higher all-grades proficiency in Math (22.0% vs. 20.7%) and Reading (33.1% vs. 27.4%), a lower free/reduced lunch rate (64.02% vs. 71.94%), and the better rank history in all three years shown. Its Reading score of 33.1% is the only all-grades subject where either school exceeds the district average of 31.0%. North Junior High stands out in narrower ways: higher Science proficiency (7.9% vs. 6.0%), a 6th-grade Math score of 23.6% that beats both South’s 20.5% and the district’s 23.0%, and the larger year-over-year Math gain, 17.57% to 20.70%. Neither school exceeds state proficiency in any major subject, and both are 1-star schools in 2025–2026.
Science is the weakest subject at both schools, with South at 6.0% and North at 7.9% — less than half Minnesota’s 8th-grade Science figure of 16.7%. The two are trending differently: South declined in all three subjects (Math −0.46 pp, Reading −4.10 pp, Science −4.60 pp), while North gained 3.13 points in Math and held Science nearly flat. South’s rank edge has narrowed from a 14-point percentile gap in 2023–2024 to 4 points in 2025–2026. Two caveats: Science is reported at these schools only for 8th grade, and the Reading exam label changed from MCA-III to MCA-IV between years, so that year-over-year comparison deserves mild caution.
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