EACS Early Childhood Preschool

East Allen County Schools, prekindergarten; the district's preschool, counted as a school of its own in the state and federal records; housed, in the district's own school documents, at New Haven Primary School, New Haven

The program: EACS Early Childhood Preschool is East Allen County Schools' preschool, the youngest rung of the district's ladder. The state carries it as a school in its own right: the Indiana Department of Education's list of public school numbers gives it school number 0318 in the East Allen corporation, under this name, and the federal school record counts it under the same name. It teaches prekindergarten only. It is the one East Allen school that exists for children below kindergarten age, and it closes the district's roster in this record: with this entry, every school the state numbers for East Allen County Schools has an entry of its own in the Fort Wayne schools record.

The federal record: The district's preschool enters the federal counts as a school of its own in 1989, with 75 students and nine teachers. That year is the first year of the federal series, not a documented founding, and this entry does not print it as one; no source reached gives the program a founding date. The counts that follow describe a small program that has outlasted several rebuildings of the district around it: 86 students in 2009, 41 in 2010, 44 in 2011, 50 in 2016, and 63 students with four teachers in 2025. In the 2025 count, 56 percent of its students were eligible for free lunch, its minority enrollment stood at 30 percent, mostly Asian and Hispanic, and its recorded chronic absenteeism was 7.9 percent in the 2022 and 2023 school year.

Where it meets: The district's own school documents place the program inside another school's walls. New Haven Primary School's handbooks, for 2022 and 2023 and again for 2025 and 2026, record that students in the East Allen Early Childhood Program are among the children that school serves, at 1445 Berwick Lane in New Haven, and New Haven Primary's Title I schoolwide plan describes a district-funded preschool program in the same building serving thirty targeted children of the New Haven area. The handbook's program name and the state record's school name are two names for the district's preschool work. The documents reached do not say whether every child in the federal count sits in that one building, and this entry does not claim it.

What the record does not say: This entry is shorter than this record's standard, and the shortness is the record's, not an oversight. The program has no page of its own that the district's website search reached, no founding date in any source reached, and no named director or principal in the sources reached; under this record's rule, no leader is printed without a district source. Directory pages attach New Haven Primary's address, telephone number, and website to the preschool's profile, and one attaches New Haven Junior and Senior High School's address instead; those are the host schools' facts bleeding into the program's listing, and they are not carried here as the program's own.

Present state: The preschool stands in the current federal and state listings as an operating school of East Allen County Schools, with 63 prekindergarten students in its most recent full count.

Sources:

1. Indiana Department of Education, List of Public School Numbers: corporation 0255, East Allen County Schools, school 0318, EACS Early Childhood Preschool, https://www.in.gov/doe/files/List-of-Public-School-Numbers-3-21.pdf
2. Public School Review, Eacs Early Childhood Preschool profile (National Center for Education Statistics and Indiana Department of Education data): grade span, the enrollment series from 1989 to 2025, free lunch eligibility, minority enrollment, chronic absenteeism, https://www.publicschoolreview.com/eacs-early-childhood-preschool-profile
3. New Haven Primary School, Parent and Student Handbooks, 2022-23 and 2025-26: students in the East Allen Early Childhood Program served at the school
4. New Haven Primary School, Title I Schoolwide Plan, 2021-22: the district-funded preschool program in the building, serving thirty targeted New Haven area children