Best Public Schools in Zip Code 56208

ZIP code 56208 contains one public school — Appleton-Milan Elementary in Appleton, MN — an elementary school serving grades PK–4 with 230 students, part of the Lac qui Parle Valley Schools district. The area has 1 elementary, 0 middle, 0 high, and 0 alternative schools, so there is no other school in this ZIP to compare against. The available data covers district and school rankings and star ratings for 2023–24, 2024–25, and 2025–26, MCA-III/MCA-IV proficiency by grade and for all grades in 2025–26, all-grade proficiency for 2024–25, free/reduced lunch percentage for 2024–25, and the student-teacher ratio for 2024–25. No proficiency value in this extract is marked with the state suppression symbol (—), so the listed scores are treated as reported.

Appleton-Milan is a 1-star school, ranking 688 out of 869 schools at the 21st percentile in 2025–26. It ranked at the 24th percentile in 2024–25 and the 17th percentile in 2023–24, so it improved over three years but slipped slightly last year and remains in the bottom quartile. The district, by contrast, is rated 2 stars, ranked 295 out of 458 at the 36th percentile, meaning the school sits below its own district overall. The school's clearest pattern is a math-versus-reading split. All-grade math in 2025–26 was 40.5% proficient — above the district's 33.5% but below the state's 44.9% — and up from 38.1% the prior year. All-grade reading was 30.4%, below both the district (34.7%) and the state (48.6%), and slightly down from 31.75% in 2024–25.

Grade-level results are less favorable than the all-grade math figure suggests. In 2025–26, 3rd-grade math was 43.2% for the school versus 55.4% for the district, and 4th-grade math was 37.1% versus 38.1%. Reading was 31.8% in 3rd grade versus 44.6% for the district, and 28.6% in 4th grade versus 31.7%. Measured against the state, 4th-grade math was 18.1 points lower, 4th-grade reading 20.2 points lower, 3rd-grade math 14.7 points lower, and 3rd-grade reading 15.0 points lower. Because the district's all-grade figures include middle and high school grades while this school serves only PK–4, the grade-level comparisons are the more directly comparable ones. For context, 61.74% of students qualify for free/reduced lunch and the student-teacher ratio is 13.2. Reading, especially in 4th grade, is the clearest area of concern.