Summary:
The two middle schools in Riverside Elementary District serve different grade spans: Kings Ridge School serves grades 2–8, and Maricopa Institute of Technology (MIT) serves grades 7–8. Their 2025–26 all-grades results point in sharply different directions: MIT was above the state in both English Language Arts (ELA) and math, while Kings Ridge was below it in both. MIT’s proficiency was 79% in ELA and 54% in math, compared with Kings Ridge’s 28% and 18%, making MIT’s lead the area’s most important finding.
MIT stands out at the top, while Kings Ridge’s all-grades results are lower: SchoolDigger ranked MIT 42nd of 536 Arizona schools, at the 92nd percentile with 5 stars, and ranked Kings Ridge 340th, at the 37th percentile with 2 stars. MIT was 51 percentage points ahead in ELA and 36 points ahead in math. Grade-matched ELA results also favor MIT: its 7th-grade score was 93%, versus 24% at Kings Ridge, and its 8th-grade score was 69%, versus 25%. Kings Ridge does have a notable bright spot: its 6th-grade ELA proficiency was 47%, 6 points above the state’s 41%; its reported 5th-, 7th- and 8th-grade ELA results were below state figures.
SchoolDigger’s reported percentiles improved for both schools in their latest entries: Kings Ridge rose 28 percentile points from 2024–25 to 2025–26, while MIT rose 5 points over that period and 31 points from its earliest reported entry. These are ranking changes, not evidence of a multi-year test-score trend. MIT is much smaller, with 47 students versus 371 at Kings Ridge, and its reported student–teacher ratio is higher: 47 compared with 18.5. Its 2021–22 spending per student was also higher, at $7,978 versus $6,594; free/reduced-lunch entries are unavailable for both. Comparisons have limits: the schools serve different grades, and some grade-level math scores are suppressed, so the available figures cannot support a full like-for-like comparison.
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