Since 1830, Fort Wayne has had a strong history of education, both private and public.

This small community, like many others, recognize that education is not only the responsibility of the community, it is proof of a growing community and investing in a school system and quality teachers is vital for future growth.

In the early 1800s, when Fort Wayne was just a small village, it was recognized that there needed to be an education system set up for its children.

Because Fort Wayne was a center of trade, many African-American, Native American, French and English families settled there.

When the first teacher arrived, he found a rather diverse group of students eager to learn.

In the early 19th century, it was a military fort.

There were French traders and Indians living outside it, and there was really no education here at all from the time of military occupation.

The first school opened in the Council house of the Old Fort in 1820 of the Reverend Isaac McCoy, who was a Baptist missionary, and his wife Christiana, came here, and their interest really was in bringing civilization to the Indians.

There were ten English speaking students, six French speaking students, several Indians and one African American.

The school grew over the next two years to have up to 46 pupils.

They were taught not only the traditional grammar and spelling and writing, they were also taught the industrial arts, farming and working in the fields.

And to the Indians, this was something that was considered demeaning up until that time and something they did not want to do.

And so Isaac McCoy would go out into the fields with them and teach them how to farm.

Had been showing them that he could do it by example and that it was not demeaning.

And so his idea was to make them productive farmers, which was not something that was part of the Miami culture.

The Indiana Constitution of 1851 mandated, publicly controlled schools.

However, there was so much disagreement over the funding provided by the state legislature.

It wasn't until 1857 that a public school in Fort Wayne was officially established.

The public school movement and began as early as 1830 in Indiana.

In 1836, the Common Council took up the issue of establishing a public school system, but they dropped the idea for lack of support.

There was a minister at Wabash College by the name of the Reverend Caleb Mills, who came to Fort Wayne to speak during those years.

He was inspired by the like some Horace Mann and the whole public school movement that was going on in Massachusetts at that time.

And the idea was that public schools were a necessity for a democracy, an educated citizenry was a necessity for a democracy to function.

He also argued that public schools had it would have an Americanizing effect.

It was a time when the population was becoming increasingly heterogeneous.

There were more and more immigrants pouring into the country and people like Mills and Horace Mann and others argued that education would be a great equalizer.

It would balance the culture.

It would allow it to become one American culture rather than a lot of disparate cultures.

There were a number of privately funded schools in Fort Wayne prior to 1853, but it was during this time period that a citizen's committee petitioned the City Council to arrange for free schools.

There was a parade that was held in Fort Wayne in July of 1853 and proponents carried a silk banner, and on that banner was an image of Lady Liberty.

And above her were the words Republicanism.

And she was standing on a base that said education and virtue.

And on the back of the banner, it said, Knowledge is power.

Our march is onward.

The first school board of trustees was appointed, but since no funds were available at the time for school buildings, equipment and tuition for the 1200 eligible students, the trustees called a public meeting to vote on creating a tax to generate the necessary funds.

The result was a strong resistance and the proposed tax failed.

The trustees resigned.

Three new trustees were appointed and under a modified tax law, an agreement was made for a portion of the school budget.

Private donations helped raise the balance.

Two private schools were rented for $50 per quarter.

The McJunkin School, located on Lafayette between Main and Berry Streets and the home of Mr. and Mrs. Ann Hulbert at Wayne and Ewing Streets.

Two private teachers were hired at $150 per quarter.

Hugh McCulloch and Mr. Hulbert.

These schools were closed one year later due to lack of funding.

Hugh McCulloch had a lot of very innovative ideas.

He believed very strongly that women should be paid equally as men.

So he believed in hiring women teachers as well as men teachers for the same salary.

He believed that women or girls in school should be exposed to the same educational experiences as boys.

And again, that was ahead of its time.

Most of the public didn't have those same views.

Mr. McJunkin was recorded as a person who was a strict disciplinarian, who forcibly impressed his ideas upon the minds of his scholars and also not infrequently upon their bodies.

And quote, he was very fond of the switch and unfortunately, the kind of education that students received must have been, again, very inferior.

But the other denominations jumped into the fold as well.

The Catholics opened up the St Augustine Institution for Boys in 1844 and recruited a teacher from Maryland by the name of William B Walter, and two years later they brought in Mother Theodore Guerin, who is now a saint in the Catholic Church, to found the St Augustine's Academy for Girls.

In 1854 four public school teachers taught 400 students.

Fifteen years later 30 teachers taught more than 2000 students.

Teachers were paid a fixed wage determined by training, experience and grade levels taught and rules of conduct, attendance and assessment were determined for both the teachers and students, including a resolution passed by the Indiana State Teachers Association.

All future contracts with the teachers shall contain a clause making the marriage of a woman within the year equal to the resignation of her position.

Men teachers made quite a bit more than than women teachers, and that was not Hugh McCulloch's design.

It was certainly the design elsewhere, though, that the promoters of the public school system believed they could get female labor much cheaper than male labor.

Problem, that in the townships almost anybody could be a teacher and township trustees were tasked with recruiting teachers for the school system.

And unfortunately the school years were shorter, the buildings were inferior, teachers were poorly trained, and the kind of education that many Hoosiers got in rural areas was far inferior to what existed in the cities.

In the cities, the buildings were better, the curriculum was better established, teachers were better trained.

They had a longer school... they had a longer school year.

And so that influenced greatly the number of students attending.

The controversy over the power of the city Council to impose school taxes and to appoint a school board reflected economic, political, religious and ethnic divisions in Fort Wayne, as well as throughout Indiana.

The Democratic Party, who was the majority in the city at the time, included German and French Catholics and some German Lutherans who favored the distribution of school funds to sectarian schools, a policy that school law prohibited.

Various groups of the fragmenting Whig Party favored public schools, as did various Protestant churches that feared growing Catholic immigration and the spread of Catholicism.

They saw free schools as an answer to those concerns.

The Catholics and the Lutherans, and to some extent, the Presbyterians had their own private schools and they were functioning quite well.

And there was resistance in the community for taxing property taxes to fund a public school system when they already had a system working in place, they felt that it was an intrusion of government, that it was a libertarian issue, that government was was there to protect us from invasion.

But it was not there to invade our morals or private lives and to mandate a system of education and thrust that upon the populace was something that was anathema to them, and they argued very strongly against it.

But the public school crusaders believed again in this democratizing effect that that that the common schools, a free system of public schools would be of enormous public benefit that would educated citizenry, and it would make it more fit to execute a democracy.

Finally, the free school advocates saw results.

The Clay school was built on the corner of Washington and Clay streets.

It was dedicated with great fanfare by the community in early February of 1857.

This dedication is considered to be the beginning of public schools in Fort Wayne.

The Jefferson School, which was built on the corner of Jefferson and Fairfield, was then opened shortly thereafter.

After the Clay Street School opened, the battle lines were by no means settled on the whole issue of common schools, and in fact, opponents to the system continued to fight the payment of taxes to support public schools.

They sought a court injunction to prevent the collection of public moneys or the having the Treasury transfer those public money to the school board because they did not want the Jefferson School to be built.

And but the public school proponents organized a picnic in the summer of 1857 in Warsaw, and they used the trains to take a two hour trip from Fort Wayne to Warsaw for a picnic that was held there.

And there were addresses held 5000 people paid between $0.50 and $0.25, subscriptions for the picnic.

And they were convinced that because of the large response in the community to that, that there would be a viable enough interest for the Jefferson School to be built.

So they went ahead and built it, even though they didn't have the funds at hand to do it.

And they succeeded by getting ten people to mortgage their houses for $500 each, raising the $5,000 necessary to build the school.

There was already a huge clamoring of people wanting to enroll their students.

The schools had all classes in it from first grade, all the way up to high school in the buildings, and that was very difficult to accommodate the numbers of students that wanted to be there with all of those with the limited facilities, even though they were multi-story buildings, brick buildings, and probably the best buildings for their time, they still were inadequate for the demands.

By the late 1860s and 1870s, many of the private and denominational schools had failed or merged with public schools.

Only the Catholic and Lutheran schools survived.

One of the strokes of genius, though, that that the early trustees did in securing the the the solidity of the of the school movement was by recruiting a man named George P Ervin, who was a Presbyterian elder, and who had led the Presbyterian Academy to become the first superintendent of public schools.

He was called, quote, a liberal user of chewing tobacco as well as the switch.

End quote.

And but because he was himself a committed individual to the whole school movement, he helped solidify Presbyterian support for the movement.

And while the Presbyterian Academy would open again briefly in the 1860s, it eventually closed.

The first high school was the Fort Wayne Public and Manual Training Center located on West Wayne Street.

The curriculum included manual training, such as woodworking, to prepare students for a career.

Preparing students to live in a democratic society meant they were prepared to be responsible citizens.

It also prepared them to find employment.

In the city, high school education became increasingly considered a necessity rather than a luxury.

The high school was seen as kind of a people's college.

And more and more students attended high school, much more so than did in rural areas.

Education was a tremendously important way out.

One had to graduate from high school and a lot of parents hadn't but wanted their children to because graduation from high school meant there would be a future.

What was expected that you behaved, that you showed respect and that you learned an intense desire for us to learn.

We expect all children to succeed at their level of capability, and we expect all of them to achieve at an established level by the state.

That wasn't always true.

Girls weren't expected to attend school even, or certainly not to graduate.

As the population of the city grew, so did religious and ethnic diversity, creating social division.

There was a large German speaking population that demanded separate schools.

In June of 1874, a building was rented in order to teach German.

It was known as the North Bloomingdale German School.

There were some Germans in the community that were not affiliated with either the Catholics or the Lutheran churches, and they were supportive of a public school system.

But they were concerned that the public schools be taught in the German language.

And so they were initially opposed, but they were brought around when by 1858 it was promised there would be two German schools opened a Western German school and an Eastern German school, Calhoun Street being the dividing line.

And those were in existence all the way through the 1890s.

So it was interesting that there was a bilingual public education system even in the 19th century.

At the same time, the school board refused to admit African-American students.

As a result, those families then demanded that they receive their portion of the school funds.

It was in 1873 that the trustees and superintendent requested a meeting with leading African-American citizens.

The board offered $6.25 to each one of the black children of school age, suggesting a private tutor.

However, the suggestion was not well-received.

In October of 1875, a separate room was opened in the Jefferson School for the exclusive use of teaching black children.

There were a number of people in the city who were opposed to slavery, but they were against having African-Americans settle in Indiana.

And they passed a referendum in the 1850s that basically overwhelmingly rejected allowing African-Americans to settle here.

They allowed those who were already here before 1850 to continue living here, but they made it very difficult for new freed slaves or fugitives to come into the state.

So there was a great deal of hostility in that regard.

Not everyone believed that there were a lot of passionate, reform minded people who were genuinely interested in African-Americans and their welfare, that they helped to help them on the Underground Railroad.

They supported them.

They helped secret them through the city.

Many of them came through the canal.

Many African-Americans were relegated to certain trades like boot blacks and barbers and and things of that sort.

And that was an unfortunate chapter in Fort Wayne history.

And it was not really until that the 20th century that that things began to change for the better.

The school board continued to work to build more facilities to accommodate growth.

This growth ushered in more innovative teaching methods and expanded curriculum.

From the beginning, children were exposed to the three R's reading, writing and arithmetic.

Mostly the student learned through memorization with little attention to meaning.

Gradually, curriculum evolved beyond memorization.

Teachers mostly stood up and used the lecture method.

They stood and talked, and students were expected to sit there, take notes, learn it, and then spit it back a test time.

Those three R's are still there today, but they're not the same three R's.

We still have reading and it's still the most important of all because you can't read, you can't succeed no matter what.

Okay, so reading is important, but reading today is not reading by rote.

It's not all memory work.

Early reading was learning word recognition by sight and memorizing long passages, many of them biblical, most of them boring.

And today it's not.

There's a lot of evaluation in reading today.

There is purpose in reading today.

I remember.

My goodness, Miss Lombard, in first grade and how excited I was.

She used flashcards with great big letters on them and then a picture of something.

And I remember an apple and a big A, and then P-P-L-E and I figured it out that that word was Apple.

And that's the first word I ever learned to read.

And I was so excited.

I came home and went through all the advertising in the newspaper to see if anybody was having a sale on Apple, writing is another one, and writing initially was penmanship with Flourishes.

I loved that phrase that I found in an early curriculum description with Flourishes, and I can just see classrooms doing the O's and, you know, making all the little script flourishes that they need to do.

And they still do learn writing and they still do cursive writing in grade three, and they have a little bit of penmanship early on so that students can learn to write the alphabet in words.

But writing today is composition, and that has nothing to do with penmanship and flourishes.

That's learning to research, plan, organize, make a statement.

Write in correct sentences with enthusiasm and conviction so that a student can reach a conclusion.

And my favorite arithmetic.

Well, arithmetic used to be ciphering.

You know, you learn the multiplication tables in grade three, and then you found out how fast you could demonstrate those on the board, probably.

And all through school, all through high school years, you learned a formula and you just filled in the blanks for it, all the algorithms you had.

So it was also like rote learning.

Mathematics has replaced arithmetic and it has a little bit to do with suffering.

You'll never get rid of that.

But mostly it's problem solving.

It's data input and analysis.

It's looking at statistics, it's game theory.

We actually have a class now that includes game theory that's important in the business world.

Business education was introduced into the high school curriculum in 1915.

In those years, business education consisted of typing, shorthand or bookkeeping and business English.

Typing used to be a class.

Typing, shorthand and bookkeeping, that was the business department.

There is no business department like that today.

There's a computer department, a computer technology department.

There is no shorthand class offered in the 153 pages of the most recent FWCS course curriculum guide.

When the Great Depression hit in the 1930s, the superintendent of the time had a major challenge to keep the school system open and fiscally sound.

However, it was a time of resourcefulness and strength.

We walked to Washington, we walked the Jefferson.

Actually, we walked mostly to Central High School.

I grew up in the West End.

It was a wonderful school and people came from the East and to Fort Wayne in the West and to Fort Wayne, and it was just a good amalgam.

There were three high schools at the time, South Side, which was our bitter arch enemy and North Side, which we tolerated very nicely.

And the time that we had basketball tournaments were wonderful.

You had to be a cheerleader or belong to the booster club, and it was great.

Almost innocent fun, but it was depression time.

And if you had a date, who could take you down to the corner drugstore and buy you a nickel coke?

That was a big deal because who had nickels?

It was a tough time to grow up.

By 1899, a public kindergarten program was supported at Hoagland School.

Fort Wayne is unique in having kept this service all through the years of the Depression when kindergarten was eliminated in many communities.

I began kindergarten in the fall of 1936 at Franklin School, which was a K through eight building in the northwest side of Fort Wayne, the neighborhood where I was born, where my family and I was part of a Depression era extended family, grandparents in the home.

We had always lived in Bloomingdale in Northwest Fort Wayne, and my mother had gone through the Fort Wayne Community Schools in that neighborhood also.

Went through Franklin.

And from this blue collar background, this particular neighborhood, the school, of course, was on the corner of St Mary's and Archer Avenue and was truly the center of that community.

Even through wartime, the students and faculty of Fort Wayne Community Schools pulled together to support the war effort.

The curriculum also adjusted to prepare students for jobs in the industry that supplied parts and supplies for the war.

The group I was with grew up during the Depression and then faced well, we were the generation that Tom Brokaw calls the Greatest generation.

Most of my male classmates went off to serve in World War two, and we kind of kept track of them.

And some place at Central High School now, there was a large plaque with the names of all those from Central who served during the war and then the gold stars with those who didn't return.

By 1943, there was a shortage of teachers due to individuals joining the armed forces and taking jobs in war related fields.

The schools in Fort Wayne participated in the United War Chest Drive.

Cans were placed in schools to collect old keys, which were used in war production.

Schools were also used as centers for people to register cars for gas rationing stamps.

The Victory Book drive collected reading materials to send to the troops.

Many working mothers learned the machine shop trade as their contribution to the war effort.

And then we started getting married and having families who went to school in Fort Wayne.

My children went to South Wayne, Harrison Hill, and South Side High School.

Terrible.

They went to South Side High School - our arch enemy.

The community at this time was relatively quiet and conservative.

The teachers, of course, set an example with their professional dress and behavior.

As an example, the fondly remembered Dick and Jane series of early readers imitated ongoing shifts in America's ever changing ideas about gender, race, modern technology, not to mention fashion from the 1930s through the 1960s.

Well, when we got school, high school, it was Oxfords, bobby socks.

Oh, brown and white or black and white once in a while.

Navy and white shoes.

But one dressed and no girl ever could wear pants of any kind nor teachers when matter of fact, teachers had to dress very, very well, couldn't be pregnant and not in front of us if they got pregnant.

Goodbye.

Even the girls gym suits are legendary.

They were short sleeved.

Well, next one piece and you got into them and pulled the belt up.

And then this was it was actually shorts, but there were big legs, wide leg shorts, and they came mid-thigh.

And then under them was a were attached bloomers with elastic.

And then that's what you wore for GAA half court basketball games, if there were any.

They were they're infamous.

Everybody my age knows I'm through all the world, those bloomers were big.

I remember the first radios we used to sit and listen to President Roosevelt.

Kids can't understand that.

They don't know that they grew up with television.

All of you grew up with television.

But there is such a difference in the way one teaches now.

Memorial Park, we have a computer lab and every class goes in there and every child knows more about a computer than I do.

Things have changed, but basic things never will.

Throughout the history of Fort Wayne Community Schools, teachers have used visual aids such as pictures, charts, maps and globes in order to build meaning into ideas taught.

But technology soon entered the classroom with Leonard slides and stereo graphs.

In 1940, the first silent films were purchased, and in 1943, filmstrips were added.

Physical education started with daily instruction in gymnastics.

No games involving pitching, tossing, kicking or throwing of any ball was permitted on school playgrounds.

Through the years, however, the school system recognized the need for physical activity.

Athletics began near the turn of the century, with the recruiting of a football team from the small enrollment of boys.

The Fort Wayne High School Athletic Association sponsored an annual field day for track events.

Basketball began as a game within the school, including girls teams before 1900.

By 1914, the boys schedule called for 11 games, with other schools Marion being the furthest away.

The rivalry engendered by the start of South Side in 1922 and of North Side in 1927, pushed Fort Wayne to the top of Indiana basketball competitions.

It was a busy, growing, thriving place, one of three high schools in Fort Wayne, South, North and Central.

The suburban schools were not open yet, so the traditional sports rivalries with South, North, Central and then Central Catholic or CC as we knew it, were the schools in town, and we all knew each other and fought hard and well together.

But it was a time when Fort Wayne was growing, the schools were growing.

It was a very upbeat, different kind of place.

South Side was not very diverse in those days.

Most of the city was segregated.

The minorities were pretty much in the inner city, and that was reflected in the high schools.

In the years following World War Two, as baby boomers began to come into the schools, the system began to experience a significant degree of overcrowding.

Student enrollment, which totaled over 18,000 in the early 1950s, ballooned to nearly 43,000 20 years later.

The response to this was building new schools as well as consolidating township schools.

In 1960, the city had four high schools: Central, North Side, South Side and Elmhurst, which was the township school.

Overcrowding in the classroom, coupled with emerging educational theories, led to the establishment of junior high schools for students in grades seven through nine.

That was one of the times when enrollment was at its peak and there were three different schedules.

Some students started going at six in the morning and some went to at least five in the evening.

There were three different school day programs because the enrollment was so high.

The boomers were all hitting the high schools.

There was no more room in the high schools.

When I was in high school, we had four and five lunch periods just to get everybody.

They had staggered schedules and school days so that everybody could get in the building physically.

In 1957, there was Sputnik, and that changed not only Fort Wayne Community Schools, but all schools across the nation, because suddenly the United States was inferior in the space race and we had to do something to shore up our science and mathematics courses so that we can be competitive.

So while there was an instantaneous revolution in the curriculum, there certainly was a lot more attention paid to it and a lot more encouragement of students to go into science and math careers.

Throughout the 1960s and 70s, the Civil Rights Movement and Vietnam War had a major impact on the community, which changed the social climate within Fort Wayne Community Schools.

Students were learning about their civil rights and becoming more outspoken about racial balance and questioning the issue of war.

I loved my kids of the Sixties on Lewis Street.

The whole world was in chaos, of course, and I still go back through every box of letters I have from kids that were in Vietnam.

I lost a number of my students in Vietnam, and I still read in fact, I had a young man who was killed in Vietnam who wrote to me.

He said, I'm writing on my I have paper here on my knee and I'm writing.

He was out in a you know, in the field.

And I think it was only two or three days after I had received that letter that I heard Larry was dead.

I lost numbers of kids in Vietnam.

The world was in chaos and Fort Wayne was having its share of problems, too.

But we at Central High School downtown were like a little oasis in the middle of everything.

And of all the retaining I've done with a relationship with my students, it is these kids from the sixties who have remained closest to me.

A stricter dress code was enacted as a result of students becoming a little more independent in their philosophy and style during the sixties.

The clothes thing of that time was so interesting because skirts, you know, they No.

One, by the way, and in the 1960s, no pants, no culottes, no nothing, just skirts.

And of course, they would leave home with one length, roll them up on the way to school then they'd be sent down to my office as dean of girls to measure them.

So I spent a lot of time on my knees in the sixties, crawling around my office at Central, measuring the length of their skirts.

Girls would come in and I would say, okay, let's put the waist band.

Unroll the waist band, Let's see what you've got.

That's what we did.

Nobody would do that today.

In 1970, in October, I sent out a memo and someone reminded me of this not too long ago.

And I said to the classroom teachers, It has come to my attention that there are young women in this building wearing pants.

If you find any of these young women in your classroom, send them to my office immediately where I will contact their family to see if that mode of dress is acceptable.

African-American struggled for equal access to education throughout the first 120 years of Fort Wayne Community Schools.

History.

By the 1960s, the Civil Rights Movement created opportunities for dialog and eventually desegregation.

We were really late getting started, and it was only until the 1960s that we had a governor that began to push for changes.

And because the legislature was Democratic at the time and the Democrats were at then on the roll in Washington for changing and enacting civil rights legislation, that we begin to see changes in the school system here.

And it was really forced upon the administration at the time.

And there were there was in the early 1960s, there were no African-Americans on the school board.

And and that was considered terrible.

The fact that African-Americans were were confined to schools that were rundown and older in parts of the city that had not received the same attention as some of the newer schools that were being built.

That added to the fire.

And it was only through a series of very dramatic meetings that that the matter was resolved.

It's to Fort Wayne's credit, however, that we did not have race riots in large scale here.

We had some small disturbances, but not on the scale of Los Angeles or Detroit or other areas of the country that the whole desegregation issue was handled peaceably and reasonably amicably.

I had as many black friends and Hispanic friends and white friends.

There was a mixture.

And at Central, everybody was friend and everybody was a part of the whole family situation at Central.

So you contrast that to the fact that there were others at Central not having a good time when I was there.

It was the beginning of the sixties.

And I'll never forget the last year when we had some some division, not only among the staff members, but with the students when the the whole Civil Rights Movement and the Black Panther movement was starting to really grab hold of the concept of sit ins and marching and walking out.

I look back on it and I probably was a lot more naive than I am right now because to me, I didn't understand it.

I didn't know why people were angry.

I didn't know why we were having all kinds of conversations about the Civil Rights Movement, even though I was born in Birmingham, Alabama.

It wasn't that I didn't understand the concept of prejudice and and inequality, but from my parent's perspective.

You went to school to learn.

You went to church because you were a child of God.

God would make a better way for you, and your parents were the ones that loved you.

So some of the anger wasn't a part of my makeup.

It wasn't a part of what I was raised to believe.

The racial climate of the time prompted the school board to address the issue of segregation.

In September of 1969, a protest movement known as Freedom School, sponsored by the Fort Wayne Urban League, led many African-Americans to take their children from local elementary schools in protest of segregation.

They met in the basements of some of the African-American churches, and they held schools beginning in 1969 that were separate until the city agreed to make changes to the system.

And then they only opened for a few weeks when they were folded back into the the regular school system.

But it was a dramatic statement that was made at the time.

More than 1300 students were enrolled in freedom schools in six African-American churches.

This boycott lasted ten days until the school board agreed to establish an integration policy, starting with high schools.

The school board agreed to close Central in 1971, redraw the school district lines and build two new high schools that were more integrated.

Northrop High School and Wayne High School both opened in 1971.

Half of Central's faculty went to one school and half to the other.

African-American students were bussed to these schools as well as to Snider and North Side.

My ninth graders had just won the city basketball championship.

And you know that in Indiana, basketball is king.

And I had a kind of a free, easy atmosphere in the classroom.

And I remember Ray Causey raising his hand and asking, can I change the subject?

Why are they sending us to all these different schools?

Why are they closing Central?

And I started to explain why.

And kids were being sent out to different schools and a little Steve Bryant joined in.

And pretty soon all of them, we just won the championship.

And Ray was going to go to either Wayne or Elmhurst.

And there were being sent to different high schools and they'd never be together again.

And why was this happening?

They were very unhappy.

And I went in to the principal and said, This is what's happening.

My kids want to talk about it.

And he said, By all means, let them talk about it.

I remember Ray saying, you know, if I stay at school and want to play basketball when I go home, I'm going to have to go through an all white neighborhood.

And I'm afraid of that.

And little Curt Perdue, who was sitting up front with little red headed kid, turned around and said, You shouldn't be scared.

I'm scared walking through your neighborhood.

And so they finally got to talk and finally began to understand.

And a little bit, I hope.

So for three days, they just plain talked about what was happening and why it was happening.

I don't think there were any happier afterwards, but I hope they understood that everybody was being affected.

And for the first time, I think white kids had a chance to listen to black kids and really hear them.

If you think back to the 1960s and everything that was going on in the 1960s, the youth of the day, including myself, believe that you could solve any and every problem if you just put your minds to it, whether it was going into space or conquering poverty.

We all believe that could happen.

So in the in the world of that time, there was a large movement to integrate schools at all levels, the theory being that people would would be better citizens and children would learn better in a desegregated environment.

And there was a lot of pressure to do that.

There was also resistance by some of the traditionalists who didn't want to get on a bus, too, to ride out of town, and that was played out in Fort Wayne all throughout that period.

If you lived on the west and the north rim of what was then North Side High Schools District and your family had always gone to North Side, you were pushed to a brand new high school out on Coldwater Road with no history, no tradition, and place your family had never even heard about.

So they came out as a part of Northrop.

And if you lived on the west edge of Snider's district and had that historic base, you were disseminated.

So Northrop became a school with disenchanted, attending these all coming from different places.

The Central kids did not want to leave downtown, and that's understandable.

Every generation of their family had walked in to that particular high school.

So it was very difficult.

And most for most part, the families were happy with the neighborhood school.

I remember teachers trying to help kids understand and separate the whole inequality of the Civil Rights Movement from what they were trying to do there at Central.

Once the high school and middle schools were desegregated, the next issue was the elementary schools.

A group of concerned parents initiated a lawsuit to correct the racial imbalance of the city's elementary schools.

What most communities had gone through with racial balance issues.

That was a word that created a little fervor and threats of white flight and all those kinds of things.

And when we settled the issue with the Office of Civil Rights, they said that the elementary schools needed to be racially balanced and they didn't care how we did it, just that it just needed to be done over at least about a three year period of time.

The closing of Central was in part a facilities decision and in part a desegregation decision, but that desegregated the secondary schools.

The elementary desegregation became a major topic and resulted in a number of events in the seventies and eighties that basically led to the design of the school system as we have it today.

What was considered racially balanced was that every school had to have a minimum of 15% black population, which at that time reflected the city city's population.

So in 1987, the school system and the state of Indiana reached an agreement with the parents for quality education.

And it's one of the truly magnificent accomplishments of the school system in that we were voluntarily able to racially balance the school system K-12.

The settlement of this lawsuit was a positive development for Fort Wayne Community Schools.

The result created a new initiative known as the Magnet School Program, which offered special classes to bring white students to inner city schools.

So we approached it with the Magnet School which choice program, and emphasized that what the kids are going to see at the end of the bus ride will be something that was worthwhile, whether you were black or white.

I was told that I was to help devise a program that would not only teach the fine arts, but would bring in African-American history, that the fine arts would permeate every subject area, and the kids would get a really good sound basis for good citizenship actually.

I was amazed at the number of parents who signed up for without knowing very much about it.

We had 28 kids in our eighth grade.

That's all 100 and some in the whole school.

The next year, a long list of people wanting to get in.

And now, as you know, there's a waiting list for people who want to get in the program.

It has kept the magnet parents, the people who potentially would have gone elsewhere to look for other options.

It's kept people in the Fort Wayne Community Schools because you can find an option that suits you.

You and your child.

Adding to the cultural changes that have occurred since the 1960s or the significant economic changes in the community.

In 1961, Fort Wayne was a strong industrial manufacturing community with a wealth of high paying manufacturing jobs.

This situation began to erode in the 1970s, and the closing of International Harvester in 1982 was a major hit on Fort Wayne's workforce.

When I graduated from high school, I had friends that went to work for Harvester.

They were making $20,000 a year at International Harvester, two years out of high school, I went through four years of college, three years of law school and started at $12,000 a year in a law firm.

And they would laugh at you for going to school because the job opportunities were so great by not going to school.

Those don't exist now.

Those jobs are gone.

You know, until Harvester closed.

You could ask students what their parents did and they'd say, Oh, my dad works at the Harvester and so does my mom.

It was always the Harvester, it was never Harvester.

And you would ask the student, What do you want to do?

Well, I don't need to worry too much about after high school because I'm just going to go out to the Harvester.

And the truth of the matter is, at that time, people could make a living and work for a retirement that was pretty good.

On a global scale, it was outstanding.

But when Harvester closed, this community went into Great Depression and people had to retool.

Parents had to find a new way to make a living, and they weren't trained.

They had a lot of them left to find jobs.

And students suddenly realized, Wait, I've got to do something here to get preparation in a different area.

Economically, we were had our free and reduced lunch counts went way up.

They just soared because people didn't have the money for food.

So it was a very trying time for this community.

As Fort Wayne Community Schools ushered in the 1990s and the 21st century.

They grew to have 53 schools with an average of 32,000 students annually.

Along with this growth came an ever increasing need for accountability for each student.

Probably the last significant impact on public education in the Fort Wayne Community Schools is the accountability movement.

In the eighties, this accountability on a statewide basis became very important.

We had always tested students for personal growth and development to see, you know, a statewide test of some sort, a national IOWA test of basic skills and things.

But we had standardized tests, but we had not concerted the effort to program and plan for growth of each child and the accountability movement.

And most recently with, of course, the president's No Child Left Behind, which dovetails into the school systems that I step plans.

That has really changed education, too.

For the first time, we have teachers on the same page at the same time in the same grade, and we are assuring that all students are exposed to their level of understanding to the same standards.

And those standards are not things we just pulled out of the sky, but they are things that are decreed to significant markers for learning by all of the associations mathematics, language, arts, social studies, the math, all the associations that deal specific with standard setting.

Throughout the history of Fort Wayne Community Schools.

There have always been those that not only taught, they inspired.

The teachers were kings and queens.

They were highly respected in the community and what they said.

Your parents believed them.

There was a lot of respect for teachers.

So by today's methods, all of the different types of educational experiences we have today, basically growing up, you went to school.

There were books.

There weren't a lot of AV equipment for kids to deal with, no computers.

But it was fascinating.

The chalkboard was it.

It was the center of the classroom and you were there to learn.

What I found once I started teaching is all children need to be saved at some level, and that to do that, you as a teacher have to reach out to know that child.

To know their family.

To not discount that you as teacher may know some things, but parents want what's best for their kids and that you've got to figure out and not overlook the power that parents have in a child's life.

And we have to teach our young people to use their imaginations to be creative so that we can go on from here as leaders and to take science and to take math, because that is going to be terribly necessary as these other countries in the Third World become viable, progressive, rich economies.

Well, that's what the public system, public school system is supposed to do get young people educated, interested in learning.

Teaching them how to think.

Teach them how to dream.

And requiring them to go to school is maybe tough, but somewhere along the line we hope that a teacher can get to a kid and get him or her excited about learning.

I think the impact this community has had on us, the impact the schools have had on the community, it's one of those really good working partnerships, and I think that's pretty unique to have had that 450 years.

Fort Wayne Community Schools is working within a far different society today than it did in 1857.

However, this is an institution that has learned from its rich past.

The leadership teachers and the students from the last 150 years have overcome a multitude of challenges.

Today, that legacy inspires school administrators who partner with the Fort Wayne community to continually raise the bar for public school education, striving to provide cutting edge educational choices for future generations.