Summary
Desert Willow Elementary School serves 505 students in pre-K through eighth grade in Casa Grande, Arizona. Its latest results show that students do better overall in English language arts (ELA) and math than students across the Casa Grande Elementary District, but proficiency remains below state rates. The most important finding is the sharp variation by grade: fourth grade stands out, while fifth-grade ELA and science are notable weaknesses.
Compared with nearby schools, Desert Willow is around the middle overall, with ELA closer to local results than math. In 2025–2026, 27% of students were proficient in ELA and 20% in math, versus nearby-school averages of 29% and 24%; the school ranked sixth of ten locally in ELA and fifth in math. Both results exceeded district rates—21% in ELA and 16% in math—but were below state rates of 41% and 33%. Fourth grade was a bright spot: ELA proficiency was 40%, second-highest locally, and math was 36%, tied for the highest. By contrast, fifth-grade ELA was 17%, below the state’s 38%, the district’s 20%, and the nearby-school average of 23%. Fifth-grade science was also low at 18%, below all five nearby schools with reported results.
Science has declined overall: fifth-grade proficiency fell from 30% in 2022–2023 to 18% in 2024–2025, despite a small rebound from 15% the prior year. The state stayed at 34%, so the gap widened from 4 to 16 percentage points. SchoolDigger ranks Desert Willow at the 18th percentile statewide for 2025–2026, with 1 star; that is up from a low of the 7th percentile in 2023–2024, but below its 55th-percentile standing in 2015–2016. Enrollment and staffing are fairly typical locally: the student–teacher ratio is 21.9, near the nearby average of 22.2. The reported free/reduced-lunch rate was 54% in 2022–2023. In SchoolDigger’s 2022–2023 group rankings, the school ranked at the 68th percentile for English Language Learner students, compared with the 36th percentile overall; for Multi-racial students, it ranked at the 1st percentile. These group rankings are from different years and are signals for further inquiry, not current-year measures.
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