Memorial Park Middle School

Fort Wayne Community Schools, 2200 Maumee Avenue, Fort Wayne; grades six through eight; under construction in 1966 beside Memorial Park; the district fine arts magnet, now a STEAM magnet

Opening: The district's own photograph fixes the start of the story: Memorial Park Middle School under construction in August 1966, captioned and posted by Fort Wayne Community Schools in its throwback history series in May 2019. A federal data profile gives the school's founding year as 1966, which is the construction year on the photograph. The first school year the building served is not pinned by any district source found for this history. A building rising in August 1966 would ordinarily open the following fall, but ordinarily is not evidence, and this page prints the construction date and leaves the opening year open rather than dressing an inference as a fact.

The Park: The school takes its name from the ground beside it, and the ground has a documented story. Memorial Park covers forty two acres at Washington Boulevard and Maumee Avenue. Its land had been the city's golf grounds, and it was acquired from Minnie Hill White on November 29, 1918, eighteen days after the Armistice, as the city's tribute to the Fort Wayne and Allen County men who died in the First World War. The Allen County and Fort Wayne World War Memorial in the park was dedicated on November 12, 1928, before a crowd of about twelve thousand, and the Olen J. Pond Memorial followed on November 11, 1930. From 1946 to 1954 the park was also the home field of the Fort Wayne Daisies of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, so the school's students have always walked to class past a war memorial and a ballfield with a league of its own in its past.

The Magnet: Memorial Park is not a neighborhood school, and that is the point of it. Fort Wayne Community Schools built its fine arts magnet chain in three steps, Whitney Young Early Childhood Center, Weisser Park Elementary School and Memorial Park Middle School for grades six through eight, and the district's Tuesday Tours releases state the rule plainly: magnet schools have no boundaries and draw students from across the district. Principal Bradley Crozier, in his ninth year at the school, writes on its own page that Memorial Park has a long standing history as the fine arts magnet middle school program in the district, and that beginning in the 2019 to 2020 school year the school began expanding into a S.T.E.A.M. magnet program. The school now styles itself Memorial Park STEAM Middle School.

Programs: The Pirates, the school's teams, run an engineering program beside the arts, and the engineering students keep an amateur radio club, the Pirates Engineering club, call sign KD9PE, under instructor Jon Luckey. A county ham radio newsletter in March 2024 described Memorial Park as a magnet school of six hundred students and STEM certified. Design work for the magnet program has included outdoor classroom and engineering workshop concepts drawn for the school by the JPR firm.

Enrollment: The federal counts trace the magnet draw in numbers. Memorial Park counted 535 students in 1987, then fell hard, to 401 in 1988 and 369 in 1989, before climbing through the nineteen nineties, 481 in 1993 and 641 in 1997, and settling onto a plateau above six hundred that has held, with small variations, ever since. The peak was 652 in 2014. In 2024 to 2025 the National Center for Education Statistics counted 627 students, taught by forty seven teachers, about thirteen students to a teacher. The student body that year was thirty percent Black, twenty one percent Hispanic, three percent Asian and thirty eight percent white, a districtwide mix rather than a neighborhood one, which is what a school with no boundary is supposed to look like. No source found dates the year the fine arts magnet designation itself began, and the climb in the nineteen nineties is printed as the count gives it, without assigning it a cause the record does not name.

Today: In 2026 Memorial Park is an open, operating magnet school of about six hundred thirty students on Maumee Avenue, beside the park whose name it carries, teaching the arts it was magnetized for and the engineering it has grown into since 2019, in a building the district photographed as bare framing in the summer of 1966.

Sources:

1. Fort Wayne Community Schools, throwback post, May 23, 2019, collected in Allen County Genealogical Society, Middle Schools in Allen County, Allen INGenWeb, 2026: Memorial Park Middle School under construction in August 1966.
2. City of Fort Wayne Parks and Recreation, Memorial Park history, and Visit Fort Wayne, Memorial Park profile, updated October 2026: forty two acres, the golf grounds acquired from Minnie Hill White on November 29, 1918, the World War Memorial dedicated November 12, 1928 and the Olen J. Pond Memorial, November 11, 1930.
3. The Clio, Memorial Park entry, October 21, 2015: the park as home field of the Fort Wayne Daisies, 1946 to 1954.
4. Fort Wayne Community Schools Tuesday Tours releases, in AroundFortWayne, January 13, 2015, and the Waynedale News, November 9, 2018 and November 19, 2021: the fine arts magnet chain and the rule that magnet schools have no boundaries.
5. Memorial Park STEAM Middle School, principal's page, Fort Wayne Community Schools, 2026: Principal Bradley Crozier, the fine arts magnet history and the STEAM expansion beginning in 2019 to 2020.
6. Allen County Ham News, March 2024: the Pirates Engineering amateur radio club, call sign KD9PE, instructor Jon Luckey.
7. National Center for Education Statistics, Memorial Park Middle School (180363000546), as republished by Public School Review: 535 students in 1987, 369 in 1989, 652 in 2014, 627 in 2024 to 2025, forty seven teachers and student demographics.