RTR Secondary School

RTR Secondary School is a grade 6–12 school of about 380 students in Tyler, Minnesota, a small rural community — there are no other schools within 20 miles — and it serves as essentially the whole secondary system for RTR Public Schools. Because there are no neighboring schools to compare against, the most useful benchmarks here are the district and the state.

The clearest strength is getting students to graduation. RTR has beaten Minnesota's graduation rate by 6.5 to 13.0 points in all five reported years, reaching 97.9% in 2024–25 with a 0.0% dropout rate, while the state dropout rate ran 4.0–4.5%. Students from lower-income families — roughly a third of the student body — are served especially well, ranking at the 93rd percentile statewide in 2025–26, 23 points above the school's own overall standing of 70th percentile. That is the opposite of the usual pattern. Science is the school's strongest subject, running 6.6 points above the state, and eighth graders beat the state in all three subjects. Tenth-grade reading (57.1% vs. the state's 42.5%) is the single biggest advantage in the data, and reading appears to be grown inside the building: sixth and seventh graders start behind the state and are well ahead by grades 8 and 10.

Math is the clear vulnerability. All-grades math proficiency has slid steadily to 40%, nearly 17 points lower than three years ago, and it trails both the state and the district. The school's rating swings widely too — from 5 stars and 95th percentile in 2017–18 to 2 stars and 31st percentile in 2020–21, back to 4 stars and 70th percentile today. With cohorts of only about 40–50 students, a few students can move the rating sharply. Parents should weigh the steady signals — consistently high graduation, very low dropout, strong service to lower-income students, and a student–teacher ratio that has tightened from 20.3 to below 14.5 — more heavily than any single year's star rating.