Forest Park Elementary School

Fort Wayne Community Schools, 2004 Alabama Avenue, Fort Wayne; prekindergarten through fifth grade; the Cougars; built in the middle nineteen twenties to plans by the architect Guy Mahurin

The Building Years: Forest Park is the oldest building in this wave of schools, and its date will not sit still. The Allen County Genealogical Society dates the construction to 1925/1927, printing both years with a slash and reconciling neither. The same entry names the team that built it: Guy Mahurin was the architect, Snider and Rotz the engineer, and Max Irmscher and Sons the builder. A third number circulates in the directories. Public School Review's "Year Founded" field gives 1924, an aggregator value with no district source behind it, and that field has been shown elsewhere in this project returning construction years and unverified years alike. No dedication record for Forest Park has surfaced in the records searched for this page. This page therefore prints no founding year. The date in this article's sorting key, 1925, is the earlier of the genealogical society's two years, a sort key and nothing more.

The Early Record: By the late nineteen forties the school was a fixture of its streets. The district's directory for 1948 to 1949 lists Forest Park School at 2004 Alabama Avenue, the address it still holds, and tells families how to reach it: "State Boulevard Trolley Coach to Alabama Avenue." The directory gave the school a full staff page, teachers, clerk and custodian. A decade later the building still carried a sixth grade: a photograph of Mrs. Hitchcock's grade 6 class from 1959 to 1960 survives in the alumni albums the genealogical society collects, alongside class photographs from 1961 to 1963. The district's own photograph of the school in the summer of 1977 shows the Mahurin building already half a century old and still at work.

Enrollment: The federal record finds Forest Park a big school slowly getting smaller. The National Center for Education Statistics counted seven hundred fifty nine students in 1987 and a peak of seven hundred ninety eight in 1990. The count stayed above seven hundred into the middle two thousands, then eased down through the six hundreds to five hundred fifty eight in 2024 to 2025, the lowest figure in the school's federal series, taught by thirty eight teachers, about fifteen students to a teacher, drawn from an attendance area of about four and four tenths square miles, the largest of the three schools in this wave. The student body of 1988 was eighty one percent White and eighteen percent Black. In 2025 it is thirty seven percent White, twenty four percent Hispanic, twenty three percent Black, thirteen percent of two or more races and two percent Asian. The Asian share crested at seventeen percent in 2018 before falling back. Lunch eligibility tells the economic half of the same story: twenty one percent of Forest Park's students qualified for free or discounted lunch in 1988, eighty eight percent at the 2010 peak, and sixty six percent in 2025.

Feeders: Forest Park's students go on to Lakeside Middle School and then to North Side High School, the chain SchoolDigger's feeder records give for the school. The school's own calendar keeps a foot in the same ground: its annual Field Day is held at Lakeside Park.

Today: In 2026 Forest Park is an open, operating elementary school of about five hundred sixty students on Alabama Avenue, the Cougars. Its recorded traditions are neighborhood ones. Each fall the students dress in costume and hold their Halloween parade around the city block and through the Forest Park neighborhood while families cheer from the sidewalks. The school runs a Cultural Arts Week and a Fine Arts Week, an annual food drive for the local food bank, and a schoolwide carnival sponsored by its PTA, a full calendar of events hung on a building whose construction year its own record still gives two ways.

Sources:

1. Allen County Genealogical Society, Elementary Schools in Allen County, Indiana, Allen INGenWeb, 2026: construction dated 1925/1927, the architect Guy Mahurin, the engineer Snider and Rotz, the builder Max Irmscher and Sons; the district photograph of the school in the summer of 1977, posted November 1, 2018; the 1959 to 1960 and 1961 to 1963 class photograph albums.
2. Fort Wayne public schools, Directory of Fort Wayne public schools and public library, 1948-1949, full text at the Internet Archive: Forest Park School, 2004 Alabama Avenue, reached by the State Boulevard Trolley Coach to Alabama Avenue, with its staff listing.
3. National Center for Education Statistics, Forest Park Elementary School (180363000522), as republished by Public School Review and SchoolDigger: enrollment of 759 in 1987, peak 798 in 1990, 558 students in 2024 to 2025, thirty eight teachers, the attendance area of about 4.4 square miles, the racial composition in 1988 and 2025, the Asian share of 17 percent in 2018, and free and discounted lunch eligibility of 20.9 percent in 1988, 88.3 percent in 2010 and 66.3 percent in 2025. Public School Review's "Year Founded 1924" is printed here as an unverified aggregator value only.
4. SchoolDigger, Forest Park Elementary School, 2026: Lakeside Middle School and North Side High School as the school's destinations.
5. Forest Park Elementary School, school site and About Us page, forestpark.fortwayneschools.org, 2026: Home of the Cougars; the Halloween parade through the Forest Park neighborhood; Cultural Arts Week; Fine Arts Week; Field Day at Lakeside Park; the annual food drive; the PTA schoolwide carnival.