Summary:
ZIP code 56474 covers Pine River, Minnesota, and is home to three public schools serving grades PK–12 within the Pine River-Backus School District: Pine River-Backus Elementary (PK–6, 478 students), Pine River-Backus High School (7–12, 371 students), and Pine River-Backus ALP, a small alternative high school (9–12, 57 students). Together they enroll about 906 students, and the district as a whole ranks 307th of 458 in Minnesota at the 33rd percentile with 2 stars.
Pine River-Backus Elementary is the academic bright spot, ranking 410th of 869 schools at the 53rd percentile with 3 stars in 2025–2026. Its reading proficiency of 54.2% beats both the district (45.1%) and the state (48.6%), and its math (40.4%) is above the district but below the state. Its weakness is upper-elementary math, which falls from 65% in 3rd grade to 26.6% in 6th grade. By contrast, Pine River-Backus High School ranks at the 22nd percentile with 1 star, with reading at 33.9% and math at 23% — roughly a 20-point reading gap versus the elementary school. Yet the high school graduates 96.4% of students with a 0.0% dropout rate, well above district and state.
The Pine River-Backus ALP has the highest student-teacher ratio (23.8) and lowest graduation rate (52.6%), and its 2025–2026 test scores are suppressed by the state, so current performance is unknown. Notably, the elementary school has the highest free/reduced lunch rate (67.99%) yet the strongest reading results, suggesting economic disadvantage alone does not explain the differences here. Small enrollments and suppressed data mean these figures are best read as directional.
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