Amy Wentworth Came Home to Lead Indian Valley Local, the District She Graduated From

Mon, 28 Sep 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Amy Wentworth took over as superintendent of Indian Valley Local^↗ on Aug. 1, in the district she graduated from. The board chose her at a special meeting in January, according to the district's announcement, after a search run with the East Central Ohio Educational Service Center that advertised the job statewide. She succeeds her husband, Dr. Ira Wentworth, who led Indian Valley for more than a decade and retired at the end of the 2025-26 school year.

"It is an amazing opportunity to be able to come back to serve the district that gave me my own educational foundation," Wentworth wrote in answer to written questions from The OHEdTribune. She attended Indian Valley South and was co-valedictorian of the first class to graduate from Indian Valley High School after the district's two high schools consolidated. "It is home to me, and I absolutely love being here, reconnecting with friends and acquaintances I previously knew, and of course, getting to know people who have come since I left," she wrote.

Board president Bob Hall put the hire this way in the district's announcement: "Indian Valley is extremely blessed to bring on Amy's leadership qualities and high standards."

The record she walks into

Indian Valley Local enrolled 1,820 students in 2014-15. In 2025-26, the most recent school year in Ohio's packaged records, it enrolled 1,605. That is 215 fewer students, a drop of 11.8 percent across twelve reporting years in which Ohio's published statewide enrollment fell 4.9 percent.

The last of those years, 2025-26, is last school year rather than the one now under way, and nothing here describes what the district counted this fall. A word is also owed on what the measure counts, because it governs how every figure below should be read. The state's numbers are an October headcount, taken once near the start of each school year, and Wentworth describes the count plainly: it is the number of students who will be sitting in seats in the district's own buildings on the day it is taken. Students who attend Buckeye Career Center are enrolled in Indian Valley, she says, but they are not in an Indian Valley building, so they are not part of Indian Valley's headcount. The district's own enrollment figures do include those students, and hers are taken on the last day of the school year rather than in October. The two series count different students on different days. Neither is wrong, and this article reports the state's series throughout, because it is the one measure that can be applied the same way to every Ohio district.

The loss did not arrive evenly. The district fell in seven of the eleven annual moves in this record and rose in four. Its 2025-26 count was 34 students higher than the year before, ending a run of four declines. The two steepest single-year drops remain the 76-student fall in 2024-25 and the 54-student fall the year before.

One earlier year also runs the other way, and it is the year the rest of the state fell hardest. In 2020-21 Indian Valley went from 1,731 students to 1,760, a gain of 29. Ohio's published enrollment fell by 52,242 students that same year, 2.9 percent, the steepest statewide drop in the twelve years shown here.

That gain did not hold: four declines followed it. The 2025-26 rebound changes the ending of the district's line without erasing the longer decline.

Four buildings, one shape

Indian Valley runs four buildings: two elementary schools holding kindergarten through fifth grade, a middle school holding grades six through eight, and a high school holding grades nine through 12. The building sheet and the district sheet agree exactly in all twelve years, so the published district total is the count of students inside those four buildings.

All four buildings are smaller than they were in 2014-15, but the losses are no longer uniform. Indian Valley High School went from 480 students to 400, a loss of 80. Tuscarawas Middle School went from 450 to 382, down 68. Midvale Elementary went from 459 to 418, down 41, while Port Washington Elementary went from 431 to 405, down 26. As shares of where they started, the four losses range from 6.0 percent to 16.7 percent.

The pattern reaches every building, but at different rates. That rules out a story confined to one closed school while leaving open whether grade mix, housing, school choice or other factors explain why the secondary buildings lost more.

What she says is behind it

Wentworth's own account is about housing, and it turns the decline into a compliment the district cannot spend.

"There are no new housing developments in the district, and generally, when people move into the district, they tend to stay here," she wrote. "It is difficult to find a house for sale in the district. That demonstrates the appeal of the area, but it also contributes to our declining enrollment, as our population ages over time."

The state's enrollment file cannot test that. It carries no field describing where a district's students live, where they came from, or where they went, so housing supply, an aging resident population, smaller entering cohorts and school choice are all consistent with these rows and none of them is established by them.

She points to one more thing the file cannot separate out. "We are a school district where many families want to be, however, and many students who are not residents choose to attend our district through open-enrollment," she wrote. Ohio's published totals do not split a district's students into residents and open-enrolled students, so the share she describes cannot be read off the rows above in either direction.

Wentworth was asked directly whether the state's published counts describe the district she runs. "Enrollment numbers are tricky to nail down as they fluctuate almost daily and certain types of students are counted differently in certain places," she wrote in August, and answered the question: "I am comfortable with you using the numbers that you have pulled from State information."

Two ways to count the same district

Reading a draft of this article, Wentworth returned to that answer and set the district's own count beside the state's.

"I did not review each enrollment number contained within this article for accuracy," she wrote. "Certainly, the total head count of enrolled students (counted on the last day of each school year, for consistency) that we have for our records differs from the numbers that you cited."

The district keeps its own total head count, taken on the last day of each school year, and she says it shows a smaller decline than the state's series. Those counts are Indian Valley's internal records rather than anything the state publishes, so no number, chart or table in this article is drawn from them. The two measures count different students on different dates.

The state series analyzed here is an October headcount, taken near the start of each school year. Indian Valley's is taken on the last day of the year, for the reason she gives, consistency from year to year. Wentworth has since confirmed both descriptions, and the one category she names as moving between them is the career center, taken up below. Both are honest counts. They are not counts of the same thing.

Wentworth set out what sits in the gap between them. "I do realize that you pulled your numbers from a state source, which goes back to my previous statement that the enrollment numbers fluctuate and can show significant variations depending on how students are counted," she wrote. "For example, are students included in the counts if they are foster students placed in other districts that we (Indian Valley) are financially responsible for? Are students who are residents of ours, but who take full-time courses through CCP (college credit plus) counted? Are students who are enrolled in the Career Center full-time counted? Are students who are open-enrolled into the district and/or open-enrolled out of the district counted?"

One of those the state file does answer, and this article takes it up below: a junior or senior who attends a joint vocational school district full time is counted in that school's rows rather than in the district's, although the student remains enrolled in the home district. On the rest it is silent. It carries no field for where a student lives, for a foster placement, or for full-time college coursework, so it cannot be made to say how many students any of them moves. What it does show, in all twelve years, is that Indian Valley's four buildings sum exactly to its published district total. That is the measurement this article reports: the students counted in the district's own buildings in October. It is not the same measurement as a count of every student the district is responsible for, and the figures above should be read as the first rather than the second.

Not just Indian Valley

Wentworth places the district "in a rural area of Tuscarawas County," and the county's published record agrees with her about the direction. Ohio designates eight traditional school districts to Tuscarawas County, and every one of them published a district total in each of these twelve years. All eight are smaller than they were in 2014-15.

The same table declines to let Indian Valley off. Four of those eight lost a larger share of their enrollment than Indian Valley did, and three lost less. A county-wide decline is real context for what happened here. It is not an account of why this district's line sits near the middle of its neighbors.

One of the eight is the district she left. Wentworth came to Indian Valley from the superintendency at New Philadelphia City^↗, and her description of the difference is checkable against the same rows: "My previous district was larger and was located primarily in the city." New Philadelphia enrolled 2,763 students in 2025-26, the largest of the county's eight traditional districts and well ahead of Indian Valley's 1,605.

She frames the smaller district as an opportunity rather than a step down. "Much of the work is the same, although with a smaller district, I have the opportunity to be more present, more involved with staff and students, and more integrated into the community," she wrote. She also declined to let a rural Appalachian district be read as a lesser one: "Even though it is located in a rural Appalachian region, the education we provide rivals any students would receive across the state."

Where the juniors and seniors are counted

One feature of Indian Valley's grade rows is worth explaining rather than leaving as a puzzle. In 2025-26 the district published 137 students across grades 11 and 12 against 263 across grades nine and 10. The upper pair held 52.1 percent as many students as the lower pair. Statewide the upper pair was slightly larger that year, at 101.4 percent of the lower pair.

That is a reporting structure, not evidence of attrition. Ohio's published headcount counts the students in a district's own buildings, and juniors and seniors who attend a joint vocational school district full time spend their days in that school's buildings instead. Tuscarawas County's career center is Buckeye Career Center, which files its own rows, and it published 1,194 students in grades 11 and 12 in 2025-26. Those rows carry no field saying where a student lives, so how many of them are Indian Valley's is not a number this record contains.

Asked directly, Wentworth confirmed that reading and supplied the reason it matters. Students at Buckeye are not in Indian Valley's headcount because they are not in Indian Valley's buildings, she wrote, and are counted in the district's own enrollment figures instead. She also says more Indian Valley students have attended Buckeye over the past few years, and traces that to the high school's focus on helping every student find an employed, enlisted or enrolled path after graduation. For students whose path is employment rather than the military or college, she describes the career center as an ideal one. More students at Buckeye means a smaller headcount at Indian Valley, which is her account rather than something these rows can measure, since neither the district's grade counts nor Buckeye's carry a field for where a student lives.

The shape of the gap fits the structural reading. It appears in every one of the twelve years here, including 2020-21, when the district grew, so it is not something that started recently. For Wentworth that is a planning point rather than a warning: the district's own high school rows describe the students in its own building, and the students who spend those years at the career center are counted in its rows instead.

What comes next

None of the years above belong to Wentworth. Every figure in them was counted while someone else was superintendent, which makes the record the landscape she walked into rather than any account of her tenure. Kindergarten does not point clearly in either direction: the district enrolled 145 kindergartners in 2014-15 and 144 in 2025-26.

Her answer to what she inherited is not a plan for the count. It is an argument about the place. "Indian Valley is a high performing district with top-notch, modern facilities that provides incredible academic, athletic, and extracurricular activities for our students," she wrote. That is the case she has to make to the families whose houses rarely come up for sale, and to the ones from outside the district who choose it anyway.

Enrollment figures in this article come from the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce, which publishes district, building and grade enrollment counts by school year. The figures here cover the school years ending 2015 through 2026, or 2014-15 through 2025-26.

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

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