Summary:
ZIP code 97487 in Veneta, Oregon, has just one high school: West Lane Charter School, a charter school serving grades 9–12 with 84 students in Fern Ridge School District 28J. Because it is the only high school in the area, there are no other local schools to compare it with; the useful comparisons are between this school, its district, and Oregon as a whole. One important note for parents: the test-score figures for the school are for 2025–2026, while graduation, attendance, lunch, spending, and student-teacher ratio figures are for 2024–2025.
The school’s most striking numbers are attendance and completion. Its chronic absenteeism rate is 81.8%, compared with 31.6% in the district and 33.5% statewide — meaning more than 4 in 5 students were chronically absent. Its graduation rate is 31.9%, compared with 70.3% in the district and 83.0% statewide. About 76.19% of students receive free or reduced-price lunch, an indicator of economic need, and spending per student is $9,299, with a 21:1 student-teacher ratio (roughly four teachers). Every school-level OSAS test score is suppressed (“—”), so the school’s academic proficiency is unknown — that is not the same as zero or poor performance, and it likely reflects privacy protections for such a small enrollment.
District-level results provide context: Fern Ridge School District 28J ranks 38th of 141 districts (73rd percentile, 4 stars), and its 11th-grade scores are above the state in ELA (67.5% vs 46.0%), math (29.6% vs 22.9%), and science (47.6% vs 33.8%), though those figures cover other schools too. The school’s own historical state rankings were low but improving, from 258th of 283 in 2016–2017 to 190th of 266 (29th percentile, 1 star) in 2018–2019 — old data that does not describe current performance. Overall, the key takeaways are a very small school with high economic need, very high absenteeism, and a low graduation rate relative to district and state benchmarks, while its test proficiency remains unknown.
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