Summary:
Families in Amherst Exempted Village have exactly one middle school to consider: Amherst Junior High School, which serves grades 6–8 and enrolls 859 students — roughly 286 per grade. Because it is the district's only middle-level campus, the school's numbers and the district's numbers are the same. In 2025-26 it ranked 256th of 1,046 Ohio middle schools, placing it in the 76th percentile with a 4-star rating, and its rank has barely moved over three years (265th, then 256th twice). That is top-quarter performance in a community where 34.92% of students qualify for free or reduced lunch.
Academically, Amherst Junior High outperforms the state in every reported subject and grade. In 2025-26, 7th-grade English Language Arts reached 78.0% proficient — about 15 points above the state and essentially unchanged from 78.4% the year before. Math proficiency ran 13 to 20 points above the state in grades 6 through 8, and the three-grade math average rose from 64.5% to 67.9%. The eye-catching Algebra I figure of 100% proficient (2025-26) and Geometry at 100% (2024-25) reflect small, select groups of accelerated math students rather than the full 8th-grade class, so treat them as ceilings rather than as what every student achieves.
The areas to watch are specific. Eighth-grade Science slipped from 73.3% to 63.3%, leaving a margin over the state of just 2.1 points, and 8th-grade ELA fell 5.1 points, from 78.4% to 66.2%. Chronic absenteeism stands at 18.4%, meaning roughly one student in 5.4 — about 158 students — misses enough school to be flagged, and the district figure is identical, so this is a middle-level issue, not a single-school anomaly. With 20.6 students per teacher, the school posts strong results under a lean staffing model. The per-student spending figure of $6,953 dates to 2018-19 and is too old to explain current outcomes.
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