Bill Wingler Takes Over Columbia Local After Four Straight Years of Enrollment Growth

Fri, 25 Sep 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Bill Wingler took over as superintendent of Columbia Local^↗ on Aug. 1, and he arrived at an unusual moment for a small Ohio district: the enrollment line is going up.

Wingler came to the Lorain County district from Strongsville City Schools, where he was principal of Strongsville High School, the Chronicle-Telegram reported. The move was a short one in more than one sense.

"Columbia is right next door to my home district of Strongsville, and both my parents and sister live right here in the community," Wingler said in a written response to The OHEdTribune. "As I looked for a district with a strong, family-oriented culture that puts students first, Columbia immediately stood out. Meeting the school board and staff only confirmed that this was the right place for me, and I feel truly blessed to lead this district."

He succeeds Graig Bansek, who announced his retirement in letters to the school board and the district community after more than two decades in Columbia Local.

A district that grew while the state did not

Columbia Local enrolled 847 students in 2014-15. In 2024-25, the most recent year Ohio has published, it enrolled 1,029. That is 182 more students, or 21.5 percent, over the same stretch in which Ohio's published statewide enrollment fell 3.8 percent.

The growth is recent, and it does not run the length of the record. The district actually shrank in three of its first four year-to-year changes and bottomed out at 828 students in 2016-17. What followed was a slow recovery and then four consecutive annual increases across five reporting years, the most recent of them worth 41 students, or 4.1 percent.

What Ohio's data can show is the shape of the change. It cannot show the cause. The state publishes no field identifying where a district's students come from, so the reasons behind the rise, whether housing, open enrollment, or something else, are not established by these records and are not asserted here.

The growth has an address

Columbia Local runs three buildings, and the state's published building rows put nearly all of the increase in one of them. Copopa Elementary School went from 273 students to 426, a gain of 153 that accounts for 84.1 percent of everything the district added. Columbia High School moved the other way over the same span, from 279 students to 260.

The middle school shows what happens next. Columbia Middle School bottomed out at 253 students in 2021-22 and has risen in every year since, adding 90 students across three annual increases. The wave that arrived in the elementary classrooms is now sitting in the middle school, and the high school is the building it has not reached.

The current grade counts say the same thing in one line: Columbia Local enrolled 79 kindergartners in 2024-25 and 62 seniors. A district whose entering class is larger than its graduating class is not a district whose buildings are likely to stay the size they are now.

None of that is Wingler's doing. It is the landscape he walked into on Aug. 1, and it is the sort of landscape that turns ordinary decisions about sections, staffing, and space into decisions with a deadline.

What he says he is doing first

Wingler's stated first-year plan is not a plan to manage growth. It is a plan to learn the place.

"My primary goal this year is to listen and learn what makes Columbia so special and what it truly means to be a Raider," he said. "Professionally, I am focused on supporting our instructional practices, ensuring our staff and students have everything they need to maximize learning at all levels. I plan to promote the use of formative (short cycle) assessments, with engaging classrooms, as a way to create learning environments that are nimble and proactive in supporting student learning."

Short-cycle assessment is a practice about pace: check often, adjust quickly, and do not wait for a spring test to find out a unit did not land. In a district where the elementary and middle school are both absorbing new students, the argument for it is not abstract.

He said much the same thing when asked what he most wants the community to know.

"I want our families, staff, and students to know that my door is open, and I am here to listen and learn," Wingler said. "Columbia is a special place with a rich tradition of family involvement and strong community pride. My priority right now is building authentic relationships, understanding what makes our Raider culture thrive, and ensuring everyone—from our staff to our students—feels supported, valued, and empowered to succeed every single day."

What he wants noticed

Asked what deserves more attention as the year begins, Wingler pointed inside the buildings rather than at the district office.

"What deserves more attention is the incredible work happening inside Columbia's classrooms every single day," he said. "The true impact of teachers and all other staff is in how they support and maximize learning at all levels. From our pre-school, to Copopa Elementary, to CMS & CHS we want to prepare our students for college or careers. We want to ensure that we are looking at our instructional practices to provide the absolute best education that this community deserves."

That is the same priority he set for himself. Asked about his own first year, he named instructional practices. Asked what the community should be paying attention to, he named them again.

He was direct about what he inherited, and about who built it.

"Columbia has a great foundation of instruction and Mr. Bansek created a great culture here that makes employees feel invested in student educational outcomes while also caring about student well-being," Wingler said.

That is a generous thing for an incoming superintendent to say about the person he replaced, and the district he describes is the one the enrollment record describes too: a small system that got bigger over a stretch when Ohio overall did not.

The open question is what a listening year produces when the district is not standing still underneath it. Copopa Elementary has been the largest of Columbia Local's three buildings every year since 2015-16, and it is now larger than the high school and the middle school were at any point in the eleven years Ohio has published here. The middle school is filling up behind it, and the high school has not yet felt any of it. Wingler has said he plans to spend this year learning what Columbia is. The grade counts suggest he will also need to decide what it is about to become.

Enrollment figures in this article come from the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce, which publishes district and building enrollment counts by school year. The most recent year available is 2024-25.

Detailed code that reproduces the analysis and figures in this article is available exclusively to EdTribune subscribers.

Columbia Local - EdTribune OH - Ohio Education Data

Bill Wingler Takes Over Columbia Local After Four Straight Years of Enrollment Growth

A district that grew while the state did not

The growth has an address

What he says he is doing first

What he wants noticed