Blackhawk Middle School

Fort Wayne Community Schools, 7200 East State Boulevard, Fort Wayne; grades six through eight; built 1972 as Blackhawk Junior High

Opening: Blackhawk arrived with the northeast side itself. Fort Wayne Community Schools built the school in 1972 on East State Boulevard, in a corridor of new subdivisions, and opened it as Blackhawk Junior High under its first principal, James J. Richardson. A yearbook was already being published by 1973, and the 1977 yearbook still carried the junior high name, the East State Boulevard address and the Eagle as its emblem. Just east on the same boulevard, at 7400 East State Boulevard, stands Blackhawk Christian School, a private school founded in 1973. The names and the boulevard are shared. The schools are not.

The Name: No source found for this history explains who chose the Blackhawk name, or what it was meant to honor on this ground. Blackhawk later named a subdivision, a Blackhawk Farms neighborhood and, in 2026, half the title of the city Georgetown Blackhawk 2040 neighborhood plan. The record gives the name everywhere and its origin nowhere, so this page prints the gap rather than a guess.

The Building: The school the district built is a 117,000 square foot building, plainspoken early nineteen seventies school construction, meant to hold the children of a growing side of town in one place between elementary school and Snider. For five decades that was mostly the story: the same halls, the same gym, the same music rooms, aging in place while the neighborhoods around it filled in and matured.

Enrollment: The numbers tell a story of steadiness rather than boom or decline. A republication of federal and state data counts 759 students in 1987, 870 in 2003, 872 in 2014 and 776 in 2017. The district catalog counted 871 in 2013 to 2014. In 2024 to 2025 the National Center for Education Statistics counted 814 students, with 280 in sixth grade, 273 in seventh grade and 261 in eighth grade, taught by just over fifty teachers. Across nearly forty years the school has stayed inside a narrow band, roughly seven hundred fifty to eight hundred seventy five pupils.

Feeders: The pattern around Blackhawk is unusually clean, and the school states it in one sentence on its own history page. Its students come from five elementaries: Adams, Glenwood Park, Croninger, Haley and Arlington. They feed into Snider High School. The seed for this research suggested Northrop might share the flow. The district source found names Snider only, and Snider is what this page prints.

Programs: Blackhawk calls itself the home of the Eagles, and its colors, in the current facilities description, are blue and red. Its mission line is short enough to fit on a hallway wall: Prepared to Learn, Empowered to Succeed. About twenty six percent of its students are identified as high ability. The building runs on grade level teams, two per grade, and it keeps a drama program with a spring musical, a dance team that also performs at local nursing homes, and a functional skills program whose students run a coffee cart and work in a teaching kitchen. Its sharpest distinction is Future City, the project based engineering competition in which middle school students design a city of the future. Blackhawk won first place at the Indiana regional hosted by Purdue University Fort Wayne and sent its team to the national finals in Washington, DC.

Renovation: Age finally forced the question the 2020 referendum answered. Voters approved a 130 million dollar district program whose three major renovations were Wayne High School, Miami Middle School and Blackhawk. For Blackhawk the district hired Elevatus Architecture and Weigand Construction, with an estimated construction budget of 17 million dollars reported by the Journal Gazette in January 2023. The architect describes a renovation of nearly every inch of the building, with mechanical, electrical and plumbing systems modernized, accessibility brought to standard, and work staged in eight phases so classes could continue inside a construction site. A new studio was built for the school mass media program, the program behind Eagle Eyes News, its student produced morning broadcast.

Principals: Richardson, the first principal, has documented company but not a complete line. Margaret Ann Katter is listed as principal from 1977 in a biographical record. District minutes name Tim Matthias as principal in 2011 and Kara Froning in the years that followed, until Zachary Harl took the post on July 2, 2018. Harl left in 2022 for South Side High School, Virgil Griffin was announced as his successor that May, and Justin Hoering, an assistant principal at the school in 2022 and 2023, is the principal named in the most recent records, hosting a tour of the renovated building in October 2025.

Today: In 2026 Blackhawk is an open, operating middle school of just over eight hundred students, in a building its own facilities page now introduces as newly remodeled, with bright classrooms, a remodeled gym and cafeteria, refreshed hallways in blue and red, and a TV studio for student broadcasting. The school that opened for a new suburb in 1972 now serves the grown up version of that suburb, at the same address, under the same name whose origin nobody wrote down.

Sources:

1. Blackhawk Middle School, Our History, About Us and Our Facilities, Fort Wayne Community Schools, 2026: the 1972 building, first principal James J. Richardson, the five feeder elementaries, Snider High School, programs and the remodeled building.
2. National Center for Education Statistics, Blackhawk Middle School (180363000516): address, grades six to eight, 814 students in 2024 to 2025 by grade, and teaching staff.
3. Public School Review, Blackhawk Middle School profile, sourced to NCES and the Indiana Department of Education: enrollment from 759 in 1987 to 814 in 2025.
4. Allen County Genealogical Society, Middle Schools in Allen County, Allen INGenWeb, 2026: the district April 16, 2020 post that the school was called Blackhawk Junior High when it was built in 1972, and the 1973 yearbook note.
5. The Journal Gazette, January 2023, as quoted in the ConstructConnect project record, and Fort Wayne Community Schools Board minutes, December 9, 2019: the 2020 referendum, Elevatus Architecture, Weigand Construction and the 17 million dollar estimate.
6. Elevatus Architecture, Blackhawk Middle School portfolio and October 28, 2025 Principal for a Day account: 117,000 square feet, eight construction phases, the mass media studio and Principal Justin Hoering.
7. Fort Wayne Community Schools Board minutes, 2011 to 2019, and InNorthwestNews, May 24, 2022: Tim Matthias, Kara Froning, Zachary Harl and Virgil Griffin.
8. Purdue University Fort Wayne, News Center: Blackhawk first place at the Indiana Future City regional and the Washington, DC finals.