Purdue Polytechnic High Schools Expands Opportunities on Near Eastside with Englewood Location

Every student at Purdue Polytechnic High School Englewood takes engineering, and the Near Eastside campus has an entire building for it. Ten AP and dual-credit courses cost families nothing. Ninety percent of students graduate.

Schools like this don’t appear because a building came open. Englewood’s story starts in 2016, in a grant application.

What the model actually offers

The Englewood campus serves roughly 600 students in grades 9 through 12, tuition-free, in a renovated former P.R. Mallory factory building. Ten Advanced Placement and dual-credit courses are available at no cost to families. Students can take college-level Purdue coursework, including engineering classes at West Lafayette, and can earn the Enrollment Honors Plus Seal, which opens admission pathways to Purdue and other Indiana public colleges.

Alongside the engineering requirement, students can move into robotics, automotive technology, business, arts and humanities. Donald Baker, the campus's assistant athletic director and outreach coordinator, framed the range deliberately:

"We're really academically rigorous. We introduce Purdue as an option, but also other options as well. If you come to our school, you can go into engineering, you can go into automotive, or you can find your niche, and we're here to support that."

Why this matters beyond Indianapolis

Cities everywhere are asking where new, high-quality public schools come from. Indianapolis answered by backing the people who wanted to start them, and then getting out of the way long enough for it to work.

Keeanna Warren is the clearest evidence. She came in as a fellow in 2017 to open a campus and now runs the network — a Purdue alum leading schools whose premise is that Purdue is reachable from the east side of Indianapolis. The educators who built Englewood had the runway to plan it properly, and six years on, the campus graduates 90% of its students and hands them college credit on the way out.

What families on the Near Eastside have now that they didn’t have a decade ago is a free public high school with an engineering building, a robotics program with state titles, and a path to Purdue that starts in ninth grade — built by people from Indianapolis who were given the time to build it.

City Fund supports The Mind Trust, which has partnered with local leaders in Indianapolis since 2006 to launch and grow high-quality public schools.