Mounds View Senior High

Mounds View Senior High is a large comprehensive public high school at 1900 Lake Valentine Rd in Arden Hills, Minnesota, serving about 1,833 students in grades 9–12 as one of two comprehensive high schools in the Mounds View Public School District. It is the stronger of the two and one of the best high schools in the state: it has never earned fewer than 5 stars over the past decade, ranking 15th of 473 Minnesota high schools (97th percentile) in 2025–2026. Science is its signature strength — 55.6% proficiency, more than double the state's 25.5% — while reading runs 65% and math 53%. Graduation has held in a tight 95.5%–97.9% band for five years, about 11 points above the state, with a dropout rate near zero.

Compared with Irondale Senior High, the district's other comprehensive high school 2.2 miles away with a nearly identical enrollment of 1,812 students, Mounds View leads by 23 points in reading and science and 13 points in math, with a higher graduation rate and lower dropout rate. Mounds View's reading proficiency even exceeds the entire district average that includes Irondale. Columbia Heights Senior High sits in a different performance tier altogether — 13th percentile statewide, with science proficiency more than six times lower. The other nearby options are small specialty and transition programs whose test data the state suppresses, so no academic comparison is meaningful.

Two things are worth watching. Math proficiency has fallen about 17 points over four years, from 70.25% to 53%, while the state held essentially flat, and in 2025–2026 it dipped below the district's own math average for the first time. Meanwhile, results for low-income students rank near the statewide middle (52nd percentile), far below the school's overall standing, even as the school's low-income population shrank. On the plus side, the student-teacher ratio improved from 27.4 to 22.7 in a single year.