Summary:
ZIP code 56031 covers Fairmont, Minnesota, and contains two high schools: Fairmont Junior/Senior High School, a comprehensive public school serving grades 7–12 with 839 students in the Fairmont Area School District, and Southern Plains Area Learning Cntr., a much smaller cooperative program serving grades 8–12 with 47 students in the Southern Plains Education Coop.
Fairmont Junior/Senior High School is the larger, more traditional school and generally performs closer to state norms. Its graduation rate of 85.0% is essentially at the state average of 84.9%. Its dropout rate, however, is 10.7% — more than double the state's 4.2% and higher than Southern Plains' 6.0%. Test scores are mixed: in 2025–26 all-grades proficiency, the school trailed the state in Math (36.8% vs 44.9%) and Reading (38.0% vs 48.6%) but exceeded it in Science (27.5% vs 25.5%), with 8th grade Science a bright spot. Its rank slipped from 3 stars in 2023–24 to 2 stars in 2025–26, still near the middle. Just under 47% of its students qualify for free/reduced lunch, and its student-teacher ratio is 19.5.
Southern Plains Area Learning Cntr. serves a very different population: 82.98% free/reduced lunch, a 36-point gap with Fairmont, and a lower student-teacher ratio of 10.3. Its graduation rate is 66.6%, and its dropout rate of 6.0% is above the state's 4.2% but below Fairmont's. Where reported, proficiency is very low — Math was 0% in both 2025–26 and 2024–25, and Reading was 15.38% in 2024–25; 2025–26 Reading and Science were suppressed by the state, so they are unknown rather than zero. With only 47 students, a single test-taker can swing a rate by several points. Its rank history has stayed at 0 stars. These two schools differ so much in size, mission, and student population that test scores alone do not tell the whole story.
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