Southwick Elementary School

Southeast Fort Wayne; East Allen County Schools; building dated 1966; prekindergarten to grade 2, feeding Prince Chapman Academy; 6500 Wayne Trace; school number 0310

The first rung of the Harding ladder: Southwick Elementary School is the first school of southeast Fort Wayne's ladder, the East Allen sequence that runs from this building at 6500 Wayne Trace up through Prince Chapman Academy, which takes its children for grades three through six, and on to Paul Harding Junior High School and East Allen University, whose entries stand in this section. Southwick teaches the youngest of them, prekindergarten, kindergarten, first and second grades, and it is a Title I school, schoolwide, carrying the state's school number 0310. It is not South Wayne Elementary, the Fort Wayne Community Schools building across town whose long life closed in 2026; the two schools share a compass point and nothing else, and this section keeps them apart.

The building of 1966: The district's facilities accounting dates Southwick's original construction to 1966, the year the East Allen corporation was young, and the date is the entry's key on this history's building pattern. The district's own facility plan, a half century later, reads the plant critically: it dwells on the crowded basement cafeteria with no daylight, and on the want of additional classroom and student services space, and its tables list the works the building has lately had, classroom restroom renovations, carpet and flooring, roof replacement in various areas, and HVAC improvements with new boilers, carried through the years 2021 to 2024. A building of 1966 in daily service is a maintained argument, and the district's plan is the record of the argument being made.

The changing school: The federal series gives the school's second story, and it is a story of a neighborhood remaking itself. The counts open at five hundred forty-three students in 1987 and four hundred sixty-five in 1988, a school then composed, in the federal categories of the day, of three hundred thirty-five White, one hundred ten African American, ten Asian and ten Hispanic children. The 2025 count stands at seven hundred twenty-four students, the population grown by twenty-one percent in five school years on the directories' reckoning, with fifty-five teachers, and the composition has turned over entirely: forty-three White, one hundred thirty-nine African American, four hundred twenty-one Asian, ninety-seven Hispanic, two American Indian and twenty-two students of two or more races. The same pattern stands in this section's figures for Prince Chapman Academy across the attendance area, whose federal counts are fifty-seven percent Asian; what the counts mean for the streets around Wayne Trace, this entry does not assign, but the school's own mission, written in 2012, already spoke of "teaching and celebrating cultural diversity" as the school's method, a decade before the majority in its classrooms was Asian.

The school's standing: Southwick works under the federal improvement designations its own plan records: its improvement plan for 2023-24 carries the school as identified for targeted support and improvement, in both the TSI and ATSI reckonings, the formal statement that some of its student groups' results lag the whole. The plan is a working document of the kind this history has leaned on through the East Allen waves: it names the school's gaps rather than hiding them, and it is cited here as the school's own accounting of itself.

People: Three principals stand on the school's and the district's own papers, and the line is printed in their order. Natalie Drummond signed the school's newsletter of October 1, 2012, as principal, the document that carries the mission quoted above. Renita Peters is the principal named on the school's improvement plan for 2021-22, with Megan Cripe as her assistant principal. Cripe had come to the district as an instructional coach at New Haven Middle School, served three years as Southwick's assistant principal, and began as its principal on July 1, 2022, on the district's own announcement; she is the principal named on the improvement plan for 2023-24. A different name in the commercial directories is not printed, under this history's rule that a principal is named on school and district papers or not at all.

What is not recorded: Who or what Southwick was named for, no source consulted says, and the school's mascots or teams are likewise unrecorded in the record reached; both stand open, and nothing is printed in their place.

Sources:

1. East Allen County Schools, board hearing and facility plan document, July 9, 2024: Southwick Elementary dated 1966 by original construction; the facility plan's account of the crowded basement cafeteria with no daylight and the classroom space want; and the improvement works of 2021 to 2024, restroom renovations, flooring, roofing and HVAC
2. SchoolDigger and Public School Review, National Center for Education Statistics data for Southwick Elementary School: the series from 543 students in 1987 and 465 in 1988 to 724 in 2025, with 55 teachers and growth of 21 percent in five years; and the composition of 1988 against 2025
3. Southwick Elementary School, School Improvement Plan 2021-2022 (East Allen County Schools): Principal Renita Peters and Assistant Principal Megan Cripe; and Southwick Elementary School, School Improvement Plan 2023-24: Principal Megan Cripe, school number 0310, and the TSI and ATSI identification
4. East Allen County Schools news, "Megan Cripe, new principal at Southwick Elementary": Cripe principal from July 1, 2022, after three years as assistant principal and a year as instructional coach at New Haven Middle School
5. Southwick Elementary School newsletter, October 1, 2012: Principal Natalie Drummond, and the school's mission with its sentence on teaching and celebrating cultural diversity