Fargo North High School

Overview

Fargo North High School, known locally as Fargo North or North High, is a public comprehensive high school established in 1966, part of Fargo Public Schools. It is one of three comprehensive high schools in the district alongside Fargo South and Davies. Its motto is "Strive for excellence," its colors navy blue and gold, and its mascot the Spartans. NCES lists it as a regular, operational school, reachable at (701) 446-2400.

Academics

No school-specific North Dakota assessment data was located for this profile. The only academic figure found was district-wide and from a secondary source: CrimeGrade's SchoolGrade estimate puts Fargo schools generally at a B- average with 41% actual proficiency against 42% projected, describing schools as meeting expectations. That is a city-wide aggregate, not a measure of this school, and shouldn't be read as describing Fargo North. Check the North Dakota Department of Public Instruction directly for school-level results.

Neighborhood

The school is in northern Fargo, in Cass County. NCES's own record lists the school's locale classification as "Unknown" -- unlike every other profile in this directory, where a locale code (city, suburb, rural) was available. NCES reports 221 students free-lunch qualified and 81 reduced-price qualified, with 205 directly certified.

Crime & safety

Fargo produced the most internally inconsistent source set encountered anywhere in this directory. Two sources contradict themselves within a single page, and the providers contradict each other outright.

The "safe" readings: DoorProfit gives Fargo an A- safety grade, describing overall crime as 44% below the national average, lower than 83% of major U.S. cities, with a 1-in-496 annual chance of violent victimization. Its crime-map page reports 97.3% of Fargo's 37 analyzed neighborhoods graded A+, calling the city "very safe." Nextdoor lists Fargo as the #11 safest city in North Dakota.

The "high crime" readings: NeighborhoodScout describes Fargo as having one of the highest crime rates in America compared to communities of all sizes, at 42 per 1,000 residents with a 1-in-24 victimization chance. AreaVibes reports 4,195 crimes per 100,000 -- roughly 98% above the national average -- and a 1-in-201 violent-crime chance. CrimeGrade finds Fargo less safe than both the North Dakota and national averages.

What partly explains it: Nextdoor's underlying figures point at the mechanism. Fargo's overall crime rate (48.35 per 1,000) runs well above the national figure (33.37), while its violent crime rate (6.28) sits well below the national figure (13.32). A provider weighting property crime heavily will call Fargo high-crime; one weighting violent crime will call it safe. Both can cite the same FBI data honestly.

Our calculated rating

We don't publish a single proprietary score, and this profile is an unusually clear case for withholding one: no school-specific academic data exists, and the safety sources include two that contradict themselves. Averaging figures drawn from internally incoherent sources would produce a number with no defensible meaning. See our ratings methodology.

Sources