Cedarville Elementary School

Leo-Cedarville; East Allen County Schools; building dated 1997, federal series from 1999; kindergarten to grade 3; 12225 Hardisty Road

The first rung: Cedarville Elementary School is the first rung of the Leo ladder, the school where the children of Leo-Cedarville and the northern townships begin. It teaches kindergarten through third grade at 12225 Hardisty Road, and its students climb in order: to Leo Elementary School for fourth through sixth grade, and then to Leo Junior/Senior High School, whose entries stand in this section. It is one of the elementary schools of East Allen County Schools, set in Cedar Creek Township, and one of the plainest measures in this history of how fast the Leo community has grown, because its whole record is a count of small children arriving in larger numbers.

The building and the series: The building is dated 1997 in the district's facilities accounting, the Journal Gazette's list of East Allen buildings by their original construction dates, and the federal enrollment series opens two years later, in 1999, with three hundred ninety-three students. The two years between the building and the series are not explained in the sources consulted, and no separate opening year for the school as an institution is documented in them. The older Cedarville schools of the township's one-room era in the county society's records are not joined to this school here, because no source reached joins them, and the joining is left for a pass that can document it. What is documented is the climb that followed the building: the series counts the school at seven hundred seventy-one students in 2024 and seven hundred sixty-four in 2025, nearly double its first count across twenty-six years, growth measured in the federal counts themselves rather than in any district's claim.

The redesign years: The school came through the district's hard decade untouched. When the East Allen redesign approved in October 2010 closed seven elementary schools across the corporation at the end of 2010-11, Cedarville was not among them, and the Leo ladder it heads kept all three of its rungs while attendance maps elsewhere in the district were redrawn whole. The building of 1997 was, by then, simply the Leo area's primary school, the fixed first step in a sequence every Leo family learns: Cedarville, then Leo Elementary, then the junior and senior high school on the Leo campus.

The school today: Its present company is young and evenly spread: the current federal distribution counts one hundred ninety-five kindergartners, one hundred ninety-four first graders, one hundred seventy-six second graders and one hundred ninety-nine third graders. Its results are the district's showpiece in the directories: Public School Review's reckoning for 2026-27 places Cedarville in the top one percent of Indiana schools on test scores, and the GreatSchools rating carried through the directories is ten of ten. Directories are directories, and their rankings are printed here as theirs; the counts underneath them, the federal series running unbroken from 1999 to the present, are the school's own and need no ranking to stand.

What is not recorded: No principal is named in this entry. The only name the directories offer for the school's head comes from commercial listing data, and this history does not name a school's principal on a commercial listing alone; the district's own papers naming Cedarville's principal were not reached in this wave, and the chair is left to a future pass rather than filled from a directory. The school's teams and mascot are likewise unrecorded in the sources consulted, elementary schools keeping few public marks of either, and none is printed. What the record does hold, a dated building and twenty-six years of federal counts, is printed entire above.

Sources:

1. Allen County Genealogical Society of Indiana, schools page, transcribing the Journal Gazette's East Allen facilities accounting: Cedarville Elementary dated 1997 by original construction
2. National Center for Education Statistics series, school ID 180285000954, as republished by SchoolDigger and Public School Review: enrollment of 393 in 1999, 771 in 2024 and 764 in 2025; the grade distribution of 195, 194, 176 and 199; the feeder pattern to Leo Elementary School and Leo Junior/Senior High School; and the top one percent Indiana ranking for 2026-27
3. GreatSchools and homes.com directory data for Cedarville Elementary School: the Hardisty Road address and a GreatSchools rating of 10 of 10
4. Wikipedia, "Paul Harding High School," for the East Allen redesign approved October 5, 2010, under which seven elementary schools closed at the end of 2010-11