Lakeside Middle School

Fort Wayne Community Schools, 2100 Lake Avenue, Fort Wayne; grades six through eight; opened 1959 as Lakeside Junior High

Opening: Lakeside Junior High opened in 1959 on Lake Avenue, a new school for the near northeast side, and it inherited more than a name from the neighborhood's older Lakeside elementary school. In the fall of 1960 the elementary was being demolished, and workmen took down the bell that had called its students to class. A Journal Gazette photograph from September 27, 1960 shows two ninth graders, Jenness Clark and Ronald Bennett, both of them former Lakeside elementary pupils, standing with the bell after it was carried over to the junior high. The caption that ran with the picture said the bell would not ring again. The junior high outlasted the building it replaced by generations, and the district's own throwback history, published in 2019, dates the school plainly: it opened in 1959, and it is now Lakeside Middle School.

The Name: No source found for this history says who chose the Lakeside name, for the elementary school that first carried it or for the junior high that took it up in 1959. The name fits the neighborhood, which took shape around Lake Avenue on the northeast side, but fitting is not documenting. This page prints the gap rather than a guess, and the naming waits for a district record, a dedication program or a board minute that says more.

Enrollment: The federal counts describe a school that crested with its neighborhood and then settled smaller. Lakeside counted 610 students in 1987, rose to a peak of 756 in 1993, and held above six hundred into the middle two thousands. The count then eased downward in a long, even slope: 649 in 2006, 545 in 2019, 500 in 2024 and 452 in the 2024 to 2025 school year, taught by thirty seven teachers, about twelve students to a teacher. The enrollment has fallen about eleven percent in the most recent five years. The student body in 2025 was twenty eight percent Black, twenty four percent Hispanic, five percent Asian and thirty percent white, a majority minority school in a part of the city that was nothing of the kind when the building opened.

Feeders: Lakeside draws from three elementary schools, Bloomingdale, Brentwood and Forest Park, and its students go on to North Side High School. Its attendance zone covers about six and four tenths square miles of the northeast side, one of the smaller territories among the district's middle schools, which fits a school built when this part of Fort Wayne was still filling in street by street.

Programs: The Lakeside teams are the Lancers, in blue and gold. The school's paper trail in the Allen County Public Library runs through its yearbooks, with Lakeside Junior High volumes for 1961, 1965, 1966, 1970, 1975 and 1979 held at the Genealogy Center and copied in alumni albums, a shelf of class photographs spanning the school's first twenty years.

The Building: The 1959 building is still the school, and the district is still spending on it. In 2026 Fort Wayne Community Schools put a Lakeside and Northwood Improvements project out for bids through its Facilities Department, pairing the two schools in a single package of work. The original architect, builder and cost of the 1959 building were not found in the open record searched for this history, and the school's addition history, if it has one, waits on the district's facilities files.

Today: In 2026 Lakeside is an open, operating middle school of about four hundred fifty students on Lake Avenue, smaller than it was at its nineteen nineties peak and still the neighborhood school for the near northeast side, sixty seven years after the bell from the old elementary made its short trip across the neighborhood and fell silent.

Sources:

1. Fort Wayne Community Schools, throwback post, April 4, 2019, collected in Allen County Genealogical Society, Middle Schools in Allen County, Allen INGenWeb, 2026: the school opened in 1959 as Lakeside Junior High.
2. Corey McMaken, "Sept. 27, 1960: A day in photos of Fort Wayne", History Journal, The Journal Gazette, August 25, 2022: Jenness Clark, Ronald Bennett and the Lakeside elementary bell, removed September 27, 1960 and taken to the junior high.
3. National Center for Education Statistics, Lakeside Middle School (180363000538), as republished by Public School Review: 610 students in 1987, 756 in 1993, 452 in 2024 to 2025, thirty seven teachers and student demographics.
4. Homes.com, Lakeside Middle School profile, 2026: the blue and gold Lancers, the Bloomingdale, Brentwood and Forest Park feeders and North Side High School.
5. Fort Wayne Community Schools, Facilities Department bid list, 2026: the Lakeside and Northwood Improvements project, bid in 2026.
6. Allen County Genealogical Society, Middle Schools in Allen County, Allen INGenWeb, 2026: Lakeside Junior High yearbooks for 1961, 1965, 1966, 1970, 1975 and 1979.