American Leadership Academy in Queen Creek: Every Campus, Its Address, Its Grades, and How You Get a Seat

1.Every ALA Campus In and Around Queen Creek

Five ALA campuses sit inside or immediately next to town, which makes American Leadership Academy the largest charter operator in the local market by campus count — no other operator on the full local charter roster runs as many buildings here. Statewide, the Arizona State Board of Education’s FY2025 file lists 14 graded entities under American Leadership Academy, Inc. The table below is the whole local set, with the address and phone number each campus publishes for itself.

Two rows deserve a second look before you plan a morning route. The Ironwood pair sit at 650 and 850 W Combs Rd, and their published phone numbers differ by a single digit — 480-344-9899 for PreK-6 and 480-344-9898 for 7-12. Those street numbers and phone numbers are what our September 2026 check of ALA’s own pages returned, and numbers that close together are exactly the kind that get transposed in a listing, so confirm both with the school before you dial or drive. The Ironwood campuses also carry a Queen Creek, AZ 85140 mailing address rather than 85142, and 85140 is a ZIP where the USPS-recommended city name is San Tan Valley with Queen Creek only an accepted alternate — the Town does not state whether 85140 addresses fall inside town limits. If that matters for your own house rather than the school, our breakdown of the local ZIP codes explains what a ZIP does and does not prove.

The San Tan Valley campus is the mirror image of that problem. It is branded for the town next door, but the address ALA publishes for it is 34696 N Village Ln, Queen Creek, AZ 85142. A campus name is marketing; the address on the envelope is the drive.

2.What That A Letter Grade Actually Covers

Arizona grades schools A through F, and ALA’s local results all come from one document: the State Board of Education’s FY2025 A-F Combined Public File, reporting the 2024-25 school year. That file is worth going to directly, because it is the version of the grade that arrives with a school year attached to it and a CTDS number identifying exactly which entity was graded.

The practical consequence: if you are comparing an ALA 7-12 campus against a high school that is graded on its own, you are not comparing like with like. The ALA figure includes elementary results from a different building. Ask a campus for its CTDS number, look that number up in the state file yourself, and note the year. A score printed on a ratings site with no school year attached to it answers a different question.

It is also worth knowing how ordinary an A is in this market. For the same 2024-25 year, Queen Creek Unified’s 15 rated schools came in at ten A grades, four B grades and one C. An A here is the local baseline rather than a distinguishing feature, which is why the rest of this page is about structure, logistics and admission instead.

3.How the K-6 to 7-12 Hand-Off Works

ALA does not run one building per campus. At both Queen Creek and Ironwood the younger grades and the 7-12 grades are housed at two different street addresses under one campus brand, and the state still grades the pair as a single K-12 entity. That structure is the single most useful thing to understand before you apply, because it decides what your mornings look like in the year a child moves from grade 6 to grade 7.

Map both addresses of whichever complex you are considering, drive them at 7:30 a.m. rather than on a Sunday, and confirm the building with the school first — a household with a fourth grader and an eighth grader is running two drop-offs at two addresses at either complex. Families weighing the district side should read how the district middle schools are organized before committing. Queen Creek Unified elementary schools also end at grade 6, so both sides move a child after grade 6; what happens next depends on which campus the district assigns. A grade 7-8 junior high means a second move after grade 8, into Queen Creek High School at grades 9-12. Crismon High and Eastmark High, which Queen Creek Unified and the state record both list at grades 7-12 as of September 2026, run straight through to grade 12 — the same shape as an ALA 7-12 campus. Which of them an address feeds is a boundary question only the district can answer.

4.Enrollment, the Lottery, and the Timeline ALA Does Not Publish

No address is zoned to ALA, and no address is excluded from it. Arizona charter admission runs on A.R.S. § 15-184, which requires a charter school to enroll every pupil who submits a timely application unless the school receives more applications than it has room for — and only then to use what the statute calls an equitable selection process, such as a lottery. Sibling preference is allowed under that statute, inside limits the Arizona State Board for Charter Schools sets out in its preferential-enrollment guidance.

1. Apply to the campus and the grade you want, through ALA’s own application page. ALA does not publish whether one application can cover more than one of its campuses — ask, and do not assume a form filed at Queen Creek reaches Ironwood.
2. Apply inside the open-enrollment window. ALA’s enrollment FAQ says the window is posted on its site each year and typically runs November to January; it does not print this year’s exact dates.
3. If that grade still has seats, a timely application is an enrollment, not an entry in a draw. ALA says that when every application can be accepted, no lottery runs and acceptances go out in mid-February.
4. If the grade is at capacity, the lottery runs. ALA describes placing students who are not selected onto a numbered waitlist.
5. After the lottery, ALA adds further names to that waitlist first-come, first-served. Applying late in a full year buys queue position, not odds.
6. Ask which preferences the campus applies, and how a sibling in the other grade-band building is treated.
7. Re-check the waitlist number rather than waiting for a call. A number is a fact you can plan around; a hope is not.

This is the opposite of how the district side works, and the difference is worth stating plainly because it changes what a house purchase buys you. Queen Creek Unified assigns a home school by attendance boundary and runs a separate open-enrollment application for families who want a different district campus, which is why it pays to verify the district boundary for a specific address before you sign anything. A charter seat is not attached to a parcel at all. Living in Ironwood Crossing neither reserves a seat at ALA Ironwood nor rules one out — the application date does that.

5.Busing: ALA Sells It, and the Route Fees Are Published

The standard advice about Arizona charter schools is that they do not bus students, so you should budget for the school run. That advice is wrong about ALA. ALA publishes an optional, paid bus and shuttle service, branded The Academy, and — unlike most of what families ask about here — it prints the route fees. It is a real differentiator in this market: no other local charter operator was confirmed to run transportation at all. The schedule below is ALA’s network-wide page as it read on September 20, 2026; it is not broken out by campus, so confirm it applies at yours.

• It is optional and it is paid. This is not a district bus that arrives because of where you live. It is a service you buy.
• The family rate is a real break. Two or more riders round-trip is $850 a year against $500 for one — the second child adds $350, not another $500.
• Paying early is discounted. ALA’s page offers $100 off the transportation fee on full individual and family routes paid in full by August 31.
• A shuttle-only fee exists and is lower. ALA publishes a separate campus-to-campus shuttle schedule; no figure from it is reproduced here.
• Route coverage is not published. A published fee is not a route that stops near you, so ask transportation about your address before you budget.

Put the annual figure in writing before you compare campuses, because a paid bus is a recurring line item, not a one-off. It belongs in the same column as HOA dues and the SRP bill in our cost of living breakdown, and it is the one ALA cost that can legitimately change the answer for a household choosing between the Queen Creek and Ironwood complexes.

6.Curriculum, Uniforms, Athletics and Fine Arts

ALA builds its instruction on the Core Knowledge Sequence, a defined, content-rich curriculum map rather than a locally assembled scope and sequence, and pairs it with a values framework the school calls R.A.I.S.E. — respect, achievement, integrity, service and excellence. Those are the two things ALA states about its own model on its campus pages, and they are the two things worth asking a principal to describe in practice, because a sequence and an acronym are both easier to publish than to run.

• Confirmed: ALA states on its own site that it is tuition-free.
• Confirmed: the Core Knowledge Sequence is the basis of the curriculum, inside the R.A.I.S.E. values framework.
• Confirmed: the Queen Creek 7-12 campus runs athletics, with football and track both referenced, including participation in an East Valley District track meet, and it runs a fine arts program.
• Referenced, not documented: uniforms. ALA’s site mentions them in a parent testimonial. No uniform policy — required garments, cost, vendor, enforcement — was published anywhere we could verify.
• Not verified: the AIA conference and division any ALA campus competes in. If competitive level matters to you, that is a question for the athletic director, not a website.
• Not verified: enrollment at any individual ALA campus. ALA publishes no per-campus count, and the third-party figures that circulate are not sources this site uses.

Treat the confirmed list as the floor and the rest as an agenda for one phone call. The gap between "there is a football team" and "here is the division, the schedule and the fee" is the gap a tour is for.

7.ALA Against the Nearest 7-12 Alternatives

Most families weighing ALA are really weighing three things at once: a charter 7-12 path, a district campus, and the drive. The table names every secondary option in play for a Queen Creek address and sets them side by side on the two attributes that actually differ — how a seat is decided, and what the 2024-25 letter grade is attached to. It ranks nothing and says nothing about which campus an address is assigned to.

Two differences are structural rather than a matter of taste, and the grade band is not one of them. Queen Creek Unified lists Crismon High and Eastmark High at grades 7-12 as of September 2026, so a district seventh grader is not automatically headed for a 9-12 building either — only Queen Creek High School starts at grade 9. What does differ is how the seat is decided: the district assigns a campus by boundary and runs its own open enrollment on top, while a charter seat is decided by the application and, if the grade is full, the lottery. And the district brings scale the charter side does not: Queen Creek High School reported more than 2,000 students in grades 9-12 on its own site in September 2026, and Queen Creek Unified shares 32 career and technical education programs across its three high schools. If a specific CTE pathway or the size of a large comprehensive campus is the point, start with the public high school options rather than here.

8.What to Ask Before You Apply

Every question below maps to something that genuinely differs between these five campuses, or to something no published source could settle. A front office can answer the whole list in about ten minutes, and the answers are worth writing down, because they are the parts of this decision that change from year to year.

1. Does the grade I want have seats right now, or is it oversubscribed? That one answer decides whether A.R.S. § 15-184 puts you straight in or into a lottery.
2. Has this year’s lottery already run, and what waitlist number would I be? After the lottery, ALA adds names first-come, first-served, so the number matters more than the date.
3. What is the application window for the year I want? ALA says open enrollment typically runs November to January and posts the year’s dates on its site; get this year’s in writing from the office.
4. Is this campus’s letter grade its own or a combined K-12 entity grade? Ask for the CTDS number and check it in the state file yourself.
5. Which building will my child be in, and what is the drop-off entrance? At Queen Creek and Ironwood the younger grades and the 7-12 grades are at different addresses.
6. How are siblings treated across the two grade-band buildings? Preference rules are set under state charter-board guidance; ask how this campus applies them.
7. Does a bus route serve my address? The route fees are published network-wide — $500 a year for one round-trip rider, $850 for a family of two or more — but route coverage is not, and the page is not broken out by campus.
8. Are uniforms required, what do they cost, and who sells them? ALA’s site references uniforms without publishing a policy.
9. Which AIA conference and division does the 7-12 campus compete in? No classification was verifiable for any ALA campus.
10. If we start at the San Tan Valley campus, where do we go for grade 7? No continuation is published from that campus.

Do this for two campuses in the same week and the comparison stops being about letter grades, which are identical here, and starts being about grade-band buildings, drive time and whether the seat exists. If you are doing it from out of state, our 30-day relocation checklist puts the school applications in the right order relative to the address, the utilities and the move date.