Arcola Elementary School

Northwest Allen County Schools, 11006 Arcola Road, Arcola; kindergarten through fifth grade; the Eagles; the oldest school building in its district, occupied since 1921, and its smallest elementary school

The Building: Arcola is a small unincorporated community in the rural southwest of Allen County, and its school is the oldest working schoolhouse in the Northwest Allen County district. The district's Capital Projects Plan, adopted October 26, 2026, gives the building's date of occupancy as 1921. The rest of its description is a study in smallness: twenty one classrooms, capacity for three hundred students, sixty five thousand eighty two square feet, on twelve and a half acres. The plan adds the district's standing judgment of the building: "This building is structurally and mechanically sound." The school's teaching before 1921 is not documented in the sources consulted. The federal record carries the school under the shorter name Arcola School; this entry follows the district's fuller name for its title and prints the federal form where the federal figures are used.

The Keeping of It: A building taught in for a century is a building maintained for a century, and the district's facilities plan keeps the list. A new well and a replaced boiler in 1984; the academic area re-roofed in 1988; ninety five percent of the asbestos removed across 1989 and 1990, the last phase completed in 1991; a major renovation in 1997 that added thirty nine thousand eight hundred seventy nine square feet and ran a natural gas line to the school; a community pavilion built in 2001; a generator in 2003; water purification and brick tuck pointing in 2007; the gym roof and heating and cooling controls in 2014; a secure entrance in 2019; the water system and windows in 2021; boilers and a chiller replaced in 2023; an underground storage tank removed in 2024; the gym floor replaced in 2025. Read straight through, the list is the biography of the building: not one grand rebuilding but forty years of a district deciding, again and again, that the old school in Arcola was worth keeping.

The Town Around It: Arcola once had a high school as well. When Northwest Allen County Schools was organized in the middle 1960s from the townships of Lake, Eel River and Perry, Arcola's high school was one of the two, with Huntertown's, that the board voted in 1967 to merge into the new Carroll High School. The high school went; the elementary school stayed, and it has now outlasted its own high school by nearly sixty years. It serves the district's farm country: its attendance zone is computed at about forty seven point two square miles, drawn over fields rather than subdivisions.

The Federal Record: In 2025 the National Center for Education Statistics counts two hundred twenty seven students at Arcola School, taught by about seventeen teachers at about thirteen students to a teacher, the lowest ratio among the district's schools. The district's own counts run beside it, between two hundred fifteen and two hundred thirty one across the years 2021 to 2026, against a capacity of three hundred. Minority students were twenty percent of the school, most of them Hispanic. SchoolDigger ranks it one hundred eighty sixth of one thousand five Indiana elementary schools in 2025, third among the district's eight elementaries, and Public School Review places its overall testing in the state's top ten percent, with math and reading proficiency each in the top twenty percent. Its students qualify for free and discounted lunch at thirty two point two percent, the highest share in the district, and its per pupil spending is the district's highest. One figure stands apart: the school's own About Us page describes a building of one hundred eighty students, against every published count of the years 2021 to 2026. The figure is undated, and it is printed here beside the counts, unreconciled.

The Other Arcolas: This school's name is shared, and the sharing is a trap. Arcola Elementary School in Loudoun County, Virginia, is a building of 1939 on the National Register of Historic Places, and its mascot is the Dragons; the dragon material a search offers for this school's name, the dragon costumes and fun runs, is Virginia's, not Indiana's. A third, in Maryland, was closed by its board in 1982, and a fourth teaches in Arcola, Illinois. None of them is this school. This school's bird is the eagle: its own newsletter, The Spirit of Arcola, runs on Eagle Extravaganzas and Eagle Expectations, and the district's principals graphic of October 2026 pairs Arcola with an eagle.

Today: The school's principal is Kate Johanningsmeier, named on the school's own site, signing its newsletter, and carried as Arcola's principal in the district's board papers of October 2025 and February 2026. (Older commercial listings name a different head of school; the district's own papers govern, and the stale name is left to them.) The school describes itself in its own words as "a small school with a strong family feel," following the district curriculum "while also focusing on becoming a STEAM school," its character teaching carried in monthly Eagle Extravaganzas. A school that opened when Warren Harding was president now teaches science and engineering in a building its district has voted with its maintenance budget, for forty documented years, to keep. That is the whole of its distinction, and it is enough.

Sources:

1. Northwest Allen County Schools, Capital Projects Plan, adopted October 26, 2026: Arcola Elementary School, 11006 Arcola Road; date of occupancy 1921; 21 classrooms; student capacity 300; 65,082 square feet; 12.5 acres; "This building is structurally and mechanically sound"; the improvements list of 1984 to 2025, including the 1997 addition of 39,879 square feet; enrollments of 215 in 2021 to 2022 through 229 in 2025 to 2026.
2. Arcola Elementary School, About Us page, ar.nacs.k12.in.us, read 2026: Principal Kate Johanningsmeier; "a small school with a strong family feel"; the focus on becoming a STEAM school; the building described with 180 students; the Eagle Extravaganzas and life-lines.
3. The Spirit of Arcola, school newsletter, September 2025 and September and November 2026: the Eagle Extravaganzas and Eagle Expectations; the principal's messages.
4. Northwest Allen County Schools, board papers, October 27, 2025 and February 9, 2026: Kate Johanningsmeier, principal of Arcola Elementary School.
5. National Center for Education Statistics, Arcola School (school ID 180825001413), as republished by Public School Review: 227 students in 2025; minority enrollment 20 percent; the attendance zone of about 47.2 square miles; overall testing rank in the top 10 percent of Indiana schools; and by SchoolDigger, rank 186th of 1,005 Indiana elementary schools in 2025, third among the district's eight, free and discounted lunch at 32.2 percent.
6. Virginia Department of Historic Resources, register entry 053-0982, and the Loudoun County Public Schools school list: the Virginia Arcola Elementary, a 1939 building whose mascot is the Dragons, recorded here to keep it out of this school's record.