Summary:
Hollister has three middle schools: Rancho San Justo and Maze Middle serve grades 6–8, while Accelerated Achievement Academy serves grades 5–8. Their 2025–26 results vary widely, rather than showing one consistent picture across the area. Although the Academy’s extra grade makes its all-grades results less directly comparable, it also leads in every overlapping grade, 6–8.
The Academy is the clear academic standout: its all-grades proficiency was 90% in ELA, 90% in math and 78% in science, exceeding the average of the other two schools by 59, 74 and 55 percentage points, respectively. Maze Middle had the lowest results in each subject, at 28% in ELA, 13% in math and 20% in science. Rancho San Justo fell between them, with 34% in ELA, 19% in math and 27% in science. The same contrast appears within grades; for example, grade 8 math was 97% at the Academy and 9% at Maze. Rancho and Maze were below state results in all three subjects, with math their largest gap.
Recent changes were mixed: the Academy’s math rose 4 points and science 12, while its ELA fell 2; Maze’s ELA fell 7 points, and its math and science changed little, rising less than 2 points each. SchoolDigger ranks the Academy 13th of 2,703 schools with 5 stars, compared with Rancho at 1,940th and Maze at 2,296th, both with 1 star. Other differences may help families compare school settings, though they do not explain the achievement results: in 2024–25, student-teacher ratios were 27.4 at the Academy versus 20.4 at Rancho and 20.2 at Maze, and the share reported as free/reduced lunch eligible was 48%, 69% and 66%, respectively. In 2025–26, chronic absenteeism was also lower at the Academy (9%) than at Rancho (21%) or Maze (24%).
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