Bloomingdale Elementary School

Fort Wayne Community Schools, 1300 Orchard Street, Fort Wayne; prekindergarten through fifth grade; the Chiefs; named for its neighborhood; a Bloomingdale school stands on the city map of 1885

The Earliest Evidence: Bloomingdale is the oldest school in this wave and the one whose founding no surviving source states. What the record gives instead is a school already embedded in the system in the eighteen eighties. The map of Fort Wayne compiled by W. H. Goshorn for R. L. Polk and Company's city directory, dated 1885, numbers the city's public schools in Roman numerals, and the ninth of them is Bloomingdale School. Six years later the school was not merely open but full: Franklin School was built in 1891, The History Center records, "to help alleviate the overcrowding at Bloomingdale." A neighborhood school on the near northwest side was bursting before the Spanish American War. The founding year itself is undocumented in every source searched for this page, and this page prints none. The date in this article's sorting key, 1885, is the year of the map, the earliest documented evidence, and nothing more.

The 1908 Building: The Bloomingdale school that grandparents remembered stood at the corner of Marion and Second streets, built in 1908, the Allen County Genealogical Society records, preserving the district's photograph of it. From that building, in the fall of 1915, twenty young teachers of "the Bloomingdale public school" set out with their principal, Miss Margaret McPhall, to hold a Halloween party at the old Aveline house on the Leo Road, a house with a haunted reputation that the Fort Wayne Daily News played for all it was worth under a headline about schoolteachers braving the horrors of a haunted house. The newspaper spelled the principal's name two ways in a single item, MePhall and McPhall, and the record has kept both. The Bloomingdale School Alumni Association held its thirty fifth annual reunion on October 17, 1987, which means the school's former students were still organizing, and still counting, a century after the map.

The Name: Bloomingdale's naming is documented, and the source is the school itself. "Bloomingdale Elementary School is named for its location in the Bloomingdale neighborhood," its own history page says. "The school was built in 1964." The two sentences sit side by side on the district's site, and between them sits the whole caution of this page: the building dates to 1964, but the school the building houses is documented on a map of 1885. Public School Review's "Year Founded" field gives 1964, which is the construction year wearing the wrong label, the same aggregator error this project has caught before.

Enrollment: The federal record finds Bloomingdale a large school growing smaller. The National Center for Education Statistics counted four hundred twenty nine students in 1987, the peak of its series, and the school sagged across three decades to a trough of two hundred seventy eight in 2013 before recovering to three hundred thirty one in 2024 to 2025, a count that has held roughly level for five years, taught by thirty teachers, about eleven students to a teacher, in an attendance area of about eight tenths of a square mile. The composition mirrors the neighborhood's changes: Hispanic students were three percent of the school in 1988 and are thirty one percent in 2025, alongside twenty eight percent White, twenty four percent Black and thirteen percent of two or more races. About seventy seven percent of Bloomingdale's students qualify for free or discounted lunch.

Feeders: Bloomingdale's students feed into Lakeside Middle School and North Side High School, the chain the school's own history page states and SchoolDigger's feeder records repeat. The school is a Title I school and runs the district's English Language Learner program for its neighborhood.

Today: In 2026 Bloomingdale is an open, operating elementary school of about three hundred thirty students on Orchard Street, the Chiefs, in a building younger than the parents of some of its oldest alumni traditions, serving a school community that a mapmaker already counted among Fort Wayne's public schools one hundred forty one years ago.

Sources:

1. W. H. Goshorn, Map of the City of Fort Wayne, Indiana, compiled for R. L. Polk and Co.'s Fort Wayne City Directory, dated 1885, History Center Digital Collections at Indiana Memory: "IX. Bloomingdale School" among the city's numbered public schools.
2. The History Center, post, September 7, 2021, collected in Allen County Genealogical Society, Middle Schools in Allen County, Indiana, Allen INGenWeb, 2026: Franklin School, built in 1891, helped alleviate the overcrowding at Bloomingdale.
3. Allen County Genealogical Society, Elementary Schools in Allen County, Indiana, Allen INGenWeb, 2026: the school built in 1908 at the corner of Marion and Second streets; the Bloomingdale School Alumni Association's 35th Annual Reunion, October 17, 1987.
4. Fort Wayne Daily News, October 30, 1915, as collected in the same ACGSI page: twenty Bloomingdale teachers and Principal Margaret McPhall (also spelled MePhall) and the Halloween party at the Aveline house.
5. Bloomingdale Elementary School, Our History page, bloomingdale.fortwayneschools.org, 2026: the school is named for its location in the Bloomingdale neighborhood; the school was built in 1964; students feed into Lakeside Middle School and North Side High School; the school is Title I and offers the ELL program.
6. National Center for Education Statistics, Bloomingdale Elementary School (180363000517), as republished by Public School Review and SchoolDigger: enrollment of 429 in 1987, trough 278 in 2013, 331 students in 2024 to 2025, thirty teachers, the attendance area of about 0.8 square miles, the Hispanic share in 1988 and 2025, and free and discounted lunch eligibility of 77.3 percent. Public School Review's "Year Founded 1964" is the building year, printed here as a caution only.