Prince Chapman Academy

Southeast Fort Wayne; East Allen County Schools; built 2002 as a middle school, reconfigured in 2011 as an intermediate school for grades 3 to 6; 4808 East Paulding Road

The building and the name: Prince Chapman Academy is the middle rung of southeast Fort Wayne's ladder, built for one span of grades and re-set for another. East Allen County Schools built it in 2002, a one-story building of forty-two classrooms at 4808 East Paulding Road, and its school improvement plans name its namesake plainly: the school was named in honor of a prominent youth activist, the late Mr. Prince Chapman. No fuller account of Chapman stands in the sources consulted for this entry. His years, his organization and his work among the city's young people are carried neither in the district's published papers nor in the directories, and the want is printed here as it stands, because the name on the building deserves its record and has not got it yet.

The middle school years: The academy opened as a middle school, teaching the seventh and eighth grades of the Harding attendance area, and its first decade ran alongside Paul Harding High School's last. When the East Allen redesign plan was presented on September 21, 2010, and approved on October 5, 2010, it closed the high school at the end of 2010-11, and as first drawn it would have moved the academy's seventh and eighth graders into the Harding building, fixing the school's original grade span in the process of ending it. The academy took a different course than the plan first drew. For the 2011-12 school year it was reconfigured from a middle school into an intermediate school, the Harding building reopened in two parts as a junior high school and East Allen University, and the forty-two classrooms on Paulding Road filled instead with third, fourth, fifth and sixth graders.

The intermediate school: The ladder it serves is exact. Southwick Elementary School, teaching pre-kindergarten through second grade, feeds the academy; the academy, teaching grades three through six, feeds Paul Harding Junior High School, in the building the high school left. The academy is a Title I schoolwide school, one of fifteen schools in the East Allen corporation, and its own motto states its measure: "Prince Chapman: A Learning Community that produces Individual Student Growth." In the fall of 2016 the district put an iPad in the hands of every academy student in grades three through six, a one to one initiative the school's improvement plan records. In the federal counts the academy is the largest elementary school in the district, a standing it holds while teaching only four grades.

The students: Its students are southeast Fort Wayne's. The school's own improvement plans count seven hundred ninety-four students in June 2021 and seven hundred ninety-three in June 2023, and the federal directory figures stand at eight hundred nineteen students taught by fifty-seven teachers. English learners are the academy's defining company: forty-two percent of its students in 2021 and forty-seven percent in 2023 were English Language Learners on the state's WIDA assessment. The federal counts, as the directories republish them, give the school a majority of Asian students at fifty-seven percent, with twenty-one percent African American and fourteen percent Hispanic students, and the academy teaches that company in one building of forty-two rooms, which is why its plans speak of growth, student by student, as the school's whole business.

People: Renee Hutter is the principal named on the school's own improvement plans of 2021-22 and 2023-24, the district documents that carry this entry's spine, and she is named here on them. The academy's teachers hold the district's honors in their turn: Heidi Koeneman, an East Allen graduate in her twelfth year of teaching, all of it at Prince Chapman, was named the district's Elementary Teacher of the Year in the Journal Gazette's account of the award, which describes the school as about eight hundred students in grades three through six. The academy keeps no entry of its own anywhere else in this history; it stands here between the elementary it is fed by and the junior high it feeds, the middle rung made visible.

Sources:

1. Prince Chapman Academy, School Improvement Plan 2021-22 and School Improvement Plan 2023-24 (East Allen County Schools): the building of 2002 and its 42 classrooms, the namesake, the reconfiguration of 2011-12, the feeder pattern and the Title I schoolwide standing, the motto, the one to one iPad initiative of fall 2016, enrollments of 794 and 793, English learner shares of 42 and 47 percent, and Principal Renee Hutter
2. Journal Gazette, May 11, 2023, carried by Purdue University Fort Wayne's news center: Heidi Koeneman of Prince Chapman Academy named East Allen's Elementary Teacher of the Year, the school described as about 800 students in grades three through six
3. Wikipedia, "Paul Harding High School": the redesign plan presented September 21, 2010, and approved October 5, 2010, closing Harding and moving the academy's seventh and eighth graders into the building as first drawn, and the high school's closing on June 10, 2011
4. Public School Review and SchoolDigger, National Center for Education Statistics data for Prince Chapman Academy, school code 0043: 819 students in grades 3 to 6 and 57 teachers, and the federal racial composition as republished
5. Allen County Genealogical Society of Indiana, schools page, transcribing the Journal Gazette's East Allen facilities accounting: Prince Chapman Academy dated 2002 by original construction