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The city schools are not run by the city. Fort Wayne Community Schools is a separate school corporation governed by its own elected Board of School Trustees, and its roots predate the Civil War: in 1853 a citizens' committee petitioned the Common Council for public schools, and the first public school opened that year — the McJunkin School on Lafayette Street, founded, in Visit Fort Wayne's account, by Hugh McCulloch, Charles Case and William Stewart. The corporation dates its own founding to 1857, when the first permanent public school building, the three-story brick Clay School at Washington and Clay streets, opened on 9 February 1857. (The date 1851 sometimes attached to the schools belongs to the Fort Wayne Female College's catalogues, not to the public system.) By 1889 the school board was a body of the city's leading businessmen — its trustees that year were John M. Moritz, O. P. Morgan and E. A. Hoffman, and its president A. P. Edgerton until President Cleveland appointed him a United States civil service commissioner. Today FWCS enrolls nearly 30,000 students in more than fifty schools and stands among the largest districts in Indiana, its board elected by the same voters who elect the mayor and the county council, on its own ballot and its own tax levy.
Sources: The History Center, Fort Wayne Schools Banner (1853) exhibit; Allen INGenWeb, Early Schools in Allen County; Visit Fort Wayne, "A Look at Fort Wayne's History"; FWCS district materials.