La Crescent Montessori & STEM Academy

La Crescent Montessori & STEM Academy is a K–6 school with 55 students in La Crescent, Minnesota, a Mississippi River town directly across from La Crosse, Wisconsin, and it operates as its own district, La Crescent Montessori & STEM School. For 2025–26 it ranked 444th of 869 Minnesota elementary schools — 49th percentile, 2 stars — the first time it has placed in the top half of the state.

Reading is the school's clearest strength: 64.5% of students tested proficient, about 16 points above the state average and in line with much larger neighbors such as Caledonia Elementary (67.9%), Ridgeway Community School (63.6%) and La Crescent-Hokah Elementary (62.0%). Math is the clear gap — 43.8%, slightly below the state (44.9%) and well behind every in-person school nearby, including Houston Elementary and Ridgeway (67.3% each) and Caledonia (64.6%). Only the online Minnesota Virtual Academy Elementar (26.7%) scores lower. Science, at 27.3%, sits near the state line.

The school's five-year trend is encouraging: it climbed from the 21st percentile in 2018–19 to 49th in 2025–26. The hardest comparison is the closest one — La Crescent-Hokah Elementary, half a mile away, serves the same town with a similar free/reduced-lunch rate but rates 85th percentile with 4 stars and posts math scores roughly 28 points higher. That makes math the most important question here. Two cautions: with only about eight students per grade, one or two students can shift a grade-level result by roughly 10 points, and state-suppressed grade 3 and grade 4 results leave part of the picture unknown. Grade 6 reading (70.0%) is a bright spot; grade 6 math (20.0%) and grade 5 reading and math trail their state comparators, so the upper-elementary years look like the pressure point.