Wickenburg Unified District

Wickenburg Unified District includes five schools—two elementary schools, a middle school, a high school and an alternative school—serving 1,079 students from elementary through high school in the Wickenburg area. The four schools with reported all-grades results average 27% in ELA and 20% in mathematics, compared with state rates of 41% and 33%. The most important finding is that every school with reported results falls below the state benchmark in both subjects.

Festival Foothills Elementary School leads reported ELA at 32%, while Wickenburg High School leads mathematics at 25%; these results are still 9 and 8 points below their state benchmarks. At the other end, Vulture Peak Middle School posts 22% in ELA and 9% in mathematics—the lowest results in both subjects, and 19 and 24 points below state rates. Its mathematics score is 14 points below the average of the other reported schools. Hassayampa Elementary School records 28% in ELA and 24% in mathematics. In a same-grade comparison, Festival Foothills’ third-grade mathematics result is 41%, versus 36% at Hassayampa and 38% statewide.

SchoolDigger’s district rating is 1 star, at the 27th percentile statewide, and school rankings show mixed movement rather than a shared upward or downward pattern: Festival Foothills gained 4 percentile points from 2021–22 to 2023–24, while Vulture Peak fell 24 points from 2020–21 to 2022–23. These rankings are not test-score trends. School size and student–teacher ratios do not show a simple relationship with results: Festival Foothills has the highest ratio among the four scored schools, 22.2, yet leads in ELA, while Vulture Peak has the lowest, 11.6, and the lowest scores. The Virtual Academy’s all-grades test scores are suppressed, but its 2024–25 graduation rate is 57%, compared with 83% for the district and 80% statewide; its school rate is from a different year than the high school’s.