Original Research by School Decision on Twenty First Century Charter School Inc. Bennett (4310)
Twenty First Century Charter School Inc. Bennett is a small K-8 district in Maricopa County with a single school site and one additional campus. It operates as a charter school district serving elementary and middle grades, so there is no high school graduation rate to report because the district does not serve those grades. The district is built around the Bennett Academy, and for any family considering it the clarity begins with understanding its size, composition, and what the available data does and does not show about academic performance.
The student body is small for a district, with enrollment spread across kindergarten through eighth grade. The largest share of students are Hispanic, followed by smaller groups of White and Black students. The district’s reported racial and ethnic composition reflects a predominantly Hispanic student population, with modest shares of White, Black, and multiracial students, and very small numbers of Asian and American Indian or Alaska Native students. The data does not include a free-or-reduced-price lunch figure or counts of students with disabilities and English learners, so it is not possible to gauge the level of economic or linguistic need the district serves from this profile.
State testing data presents a particular challenge for a reader wanting to judge academic performance. Arizona administers the AASA in math and English language arts and the AzSci in science. For this district, every proficiency result for every grade and subject is suppressed. This likely reflects the small tested populations at each grade level; state privacy rules often suppress data when the number of tested students falls below a threshold. Some grade levels do report a tested count, and those counts are very small. For example, one grade reported only a handful of test-takers. With proficiency rates suppressed across the board, it is not possible to determine whether student achievement in math, reading, or science is strong, weak, or at any identifiable level relative to state averages or to other districts in Maricopa County. A parent should ask the school directly for its internal assessment results and discuss how the school tracks student progress.
The comparison data that is available offers a single positive finding. The district’s chronic absenteeism rate, reported from a civil-rights context, is very low and places it in the top quartile among Maricopa County’s districts. That means a very high share of students are attending school regularly, which is a concrete strength and suggests a stable, engaged student population. On per-pupil current spending, the district falls in the upper half of the middle range among the county’s districts. It is not a high-spending district relative to peers but it is not at the bottom either.
The district brief found little of lasting impact in public reporting on recent changes, which means no major boundary shifts, program launches, or leadership transitions surfaced. The community and economic context for the area, including housing values and locale details, was not provided in this profile, so that layer of context is absent.
For a family, this is a very small charter district with a focused K-8 scope. The main concrete evidence of a positive school environment is the strong attendance rate. The academic picture is essentially opaque from the testing data, not because of weak results but because the numbers are too small to release publicly. That is a limitation a family will want to explore directly with the school, asking about internal benchmarks, classroom progress monitoring, and how the school prepares students for high school readiness. Without a known locale or community housing context, it is also unclear what surrounding neighborhoods feed into this school or what the commute would look like. The district’s two campuses serve the same grade band, so there is a choice within the district of one site versus another, but the profile does not describe what distinguishes them. This is a district that rewards a direct visit and a conversation with the principal.
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