Denfeld High School

Denfeld High School is a comprehensive 9–12 high school in Duluth, MN serving 951 students, making it the largest school in its comparison group — roughly 45% bigger than Hermantown Senior High. It is part of Duluth Public School District, and 48.48% of its students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, the highest share among nearby comprehensive high schools. The Denfeld campus also hosts an alternative-learning program at the same address, so its building serves students beyond the 951 enrolled at the high school itself.

Academically, Denfeld ranks 354th of 473 Minnesota high schools (25th percentile, 1 star). In 2025–26, 18% of students met standards in math, 24.3% in reading, and 23.2% in science — last among comparable nearby high schools in all three subjects, trailing Proctor Senior High and Hermantown Senior High and sitting below state averages. These results mark a steep two-year slide from an unusually strong 2023–24, when the school reached the 57th percentile. Graduation and dropout figures are moving the opposite direction: the graduation rate has risen about 15 points in five years to 84.7%, now near the state average, while the dropout rate dropped to 6.6% — still roughly double the district and state rates.

There are bright spots. Special education students rank in the 63rd percentile statewide, well above the school's overall standing, and science is Denfeld's most competitive subject, just 2.3 points below the state average while math trails by nearly 27. Staffing is comparable to peers, with a 16.0 student–teacher ratio close to Proctor's. The bottom line: this is a large, high-need neighborhood high school making genuine progress in getting students to graduation, even as its test scores have fallen sharply and now land in the bottom quarter of the state.