Summary:
ZIP code 56479 in Staples, Minnesota is home to a single public high school — Staples-Motley Senior High — which serves grades 9 through 12 and enrolls 309 students, so there are no other area high schools to compare it against; the most useful benchmarks are the school's own multi-year trend, its parent Staples-Motley School District, and statewide averages.
Academically, the picture depends heavily on which benchmark is used. Compared with the state's all-grades averages, math looks far behind (25.0 vs. 44.9), but Minnesota tests math in 11th grade, and against the state's 11th-grade figure of 35.3 the gap is about 10 points. On the same grade-for-grade basis, reading is essentially at the state line (41.7 vs. 42.5) and science is close to it (32.9 vs. 35.0 on the End-of-Course exam). All three subjects fell sharply from the prior year — declines of roughly 8 to 13 points while state results stayed nearly flat — but with only about 70 to 80 students sitting each exam, those swings amount to a handful of students and should be read cautiously.
Where the school stands out is completion: 94.2% of students graduated in 2024-25 against a state rate of 84.9%, and its dropout rate of 2.9% is below the state's 4.2%. That is a striking contrast with a math proficiency of 25%. Other signals are more mixed — the school's state percentile has slipped from 65 to 50 over three years, it still holds a 3-star rating while its district holds 2 stars, and math is the one subject where it trails its own district by nearly 15 points, making it the clearest target for improvement. Families should read this as a solid, mid-pack Minnesota high school that reliably gets students to graduation, with reading and science near state norms and math as its clear weak spot.
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