Original Research by School Decision on Bennett Academy
Bennett Academy is a charter school serving kindergarten through eighth grade in Phoenix, operating as part of the Twenty First Century Charter School, Inc. network. As a regular public school under a charter, it is open to any family that applies, without the typical attendance boundaries of a traditional district school.
The school is small, which is common for a single-site charter serving this grade band. Its student body is predominantly Hispanic, with white students as the next largest group, and smaller shares of Black, multiracial, American Indian, and Asian students. Free and reduced-price lunch data was not available, so a parent would need to ask the school directly about the share of students from lower-income households and the availability of meal programs. Information on special education and English learner populations was also missing, which is a gap worth exploring with the school if those supports matter to your family.
State testing results for spring 2024 are mostly suppressed, which means the numbers of students tested in each grade and subject were too small to report publicly. The tested counts that were reported confirm very small group sizes across grades three through eight, roughly a couple dozen students per grade, which triggers the state’s data suppression rules for student privacy. As a result, there is no public proficiency data for math, English language arts, or science for any grade. This is not unusual for a school of this size, but it means families cannot use state test scores as a tool to compare academic performance here versus other schools. A parent may want to look into this further with the school and ask about internal assessments, classroom observations, and how the school measures student progress.
Bennett Academy’s location is on West Bethany Home Road, in a part of Phoenix that is fully urbanized. Phoenix itself is a large, sprawling city with a car-oriented street grid and a diverse economy built around high-technology, manufacturing, tourism, and services. The school sits within Maricopa County, which contains hundreds of other districts, so families have many school options nearby.
No graduation rate applies here because the school does not serve high school grades. No data on chronic absenteeism was available. The district brief turned up no recent changes of lasting impact to report.
For a family considering Bennett Academy, this is a very small charter elementary and middle school in an urban setting. The key unknown is academic performance, because the state has suppressed all test results due to the school’s enrollment size. The school’s charter status means it has some operational autonomy over curriculum and staffing, but the data does not describe its specific educational approach or program offerings. A parent who values being able to compare test results against other schools may find this lack of data limiting. A parent who is open to a small school community and wants to evaluate fit based on a visit and conversation with staff rather than on published metrics may find that approach workable here.
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