By Dan Spalding
News Now Warsaw
WARSAW — Whitko Community Schools Superintendent Dr. Amy Korus, a graduate of the school district, has seen career stop in Fort Wayne, the suburbs of Chicago and elsewhere before she eventually returned to where it all began.
After working in much larger school districts, with bigger classroom sizes and different budgeting constraints, she’s happily embraced working in her office in Larwill, which she admits is essentially in the middle of nowhere.
Korus started her career as a first-grade teacher and then began a 14-year stint focusing on special education before eventually becoming the principal at Manchester Elementary — a job she said that she truly loved.
That passion to be an administrative leader led to more opportunities, and her most recent job was as an assistant superintendent at East Noble School Corporation.
In 2024, she accepted the job as superintendent at Whitko, replacing Tim Pivarnik.
Despite a steady decline in enrollment (currently 1,200 students) and pressures as a result of the state’s property tax reform efforts, she said the district’s finances are stable.
The district, despite changes, is not precipitously on the edge, and any such notions, she said, “are absolutely not true.”
Enrollment has declined roughly 25 percent in the past ten years, but said she believes they’ve seen some reversal in that trend in the past year or so.
“We’ve lost students to homeschool. We’ve lost students to digital online learning. However, in the last, I would say, year we have started to see many of those students start to come back,” Korus said.
She also thinks the district’s emphasis on career and technical education at the Whitko Career Academy is making a difference.
“This is Whitko’s flagship,” Korus said during an interview for In The Know, the pubic affairs show you can hear this weekend on Kensington Digital Media radio stations.
“I don’t want to say it saved the district, but it definitely brought us into the running as one of the best CTE centers in northern Indiana.”
“We get districts from all over the state coming to visit our our school and not only do they come visit it because it’s amazing, but we have such great partnerships with corporations in our area and just having that community connection is really important people need to know what kids are doing and in return We also need to hear from from manufacturers and and community members on what they need,” she said.
The academy offers 11 pathways for students to choose from. Some of the most popular include construction trades, advanced manufacturing, engineering, and agriculture.
The program includes an agreement with Whitley Community Schools and Smith-Green Community Schools, which includes Churubusco High School.
“It’s nice because instead of one school, one academy, now we have three menus to choose from … and so we don’t need to replicate 20 in Columbia City,” Korus said. “If we have a student who’s interested in something like fire, they can go to Columbia City and get the fire training that we don’t offer.”
The district also has childcare services that support both staff and the community.
Enrollment is around 60 children, with about 80 percent coming from the community.
“We are talking about adding another classroom at Pierceton Elementary for our four- and five-year-olds because that class is full. Our infant classroom is currently full, but we’re looking for … ways that we can grow and meet the needs of Pierceton, specifically, because that’s where we’ve heard from community members that we need more,” Korus said.
