Best Public Schools in Zip Code 56359

ZIP code 56359 covers Onamia, Minnesota, where 7 schools enroll 681 students across grades PK–12. Six of the schools, enrolling 556 students (81.6%), belong to the Onamia Public School District, while Nay-Ah-Shing School (125 students, 18.4%) operates under its own district. Grade spans overlap heavily: Onamia High School serves grades 7–12, Success serves 7–9, Onamia Academy serves 4–12, and Nay-Ah-Shing serves K–12, so middle grades appear in several schools rather than one. Poverty is uniformly high: among the six schools reporting free/reduced lunch, the average is 84.73%, and every reporting school is above 74%.

Test scores sit well below state averages. In 2025–26, the Onamia Public School District posted 17.1% proficiency in math, 19.2% in reading, and 13.4% in science, versus statewide rates of 44.9%, 48.6%, and 25.5%. Onamia High School is the relative bright spot: it is the largest school at 224 students, its graduation rate of 86.9% beats both the district (80.0%) and the state (84.9%), its dropout rate of 4.3% is near the state's 4.2%, and it climbed from the 8th to the 23rd percentile in state rank. Onamia Elementary School shows the starkest result — 0% science proficiency for all grades, an exact reported zero — and its rank fell from the 21st percentile to the 6th over three years. Kokesh Area Learning Center reported a 5.8% graduation rate for 2023–24, an extreme outlier worth interpreting cautiously.

Staffing ratios are not comparable across schools: Onamia Academy reports 42.8 students per teacher, while Nay-Ah-Shing School (4.0) and Onamia Primary School (5.4) are far lower. Data gaps also limit comparisons. Several 2025–26 test scores at Kokesh Area Learning Center are suppressed, and Success (7 students), Nay-Ah-Shing School, and Onamia Primary School have no recent all-grades test results in this file — a dash means suppressed or unknown, not zero. Overall, this is a small, high-poverty district with below-state test scores, one strong graduation story at the high school, and many schools too small to evaluate fully.