Towles Intermediate School

2006 – present

Founded: Towles opened in the fall of 2006 at 420 East Paulding Road as a first through eighth grade Montessori school, the first public school in Indiana to offer Montessori across that span. It is a magnet school with no geographical attendance area, the middle link of the district's Montessori chain: Bunche Early Childhood Center feeds it, and its students feed the New Tech Academy at Wayne High School. The district's board minutes of 13 February 2006 record the conversion of the Geyer Middle School site to Towles that fall, down to buying the last house in the block east of the school to leave room to expand the playing fields.

The building: The building is older than the school. It was built as Ben F. Geyer Junior High in the district's 1950s building boom and opened to students on 16 November 1959, when principal Cecil Rice moved with the student body from Merle J. Abbett school. As Geyer it served grades six through eight until the 2006 conversion.

Namesake: The school honors Dr. Jeff Herman Towles (1929-2004), a Fort Wayne surgeon who served on the Board of School Trustees from 1981 to 1988 and was elected its president in 1987, the first African American to hold that office. His board service ran through the district's desegregation years, and the district credits him with helping lay the groundwork for the racial balance plan Fort Wayne eventually adopted. In May 1980 he led the surgery team that operated on the civil rights leader Vernon Jordan, shot in a Fort Wayne hotel parking lot.

Programs: Two programs share the building. Grades one through five follow the Montessori method, multi-age classrooms, hands-on materials and work at the child's own pace. The upper grades are Towles New Tech, a project-based program begun with seventh and eighth grades in 2013-14 and extended to sixth grade in 2019-20. The school also hosts an English Language Learners program.

Today: Towles is an operating Fort Wayne Community Schools magnet school in Board District 5. The National Center for Education Statistics counted 600 students in 2024-25. Its principal is Jennifer Witzigreuter, at the school in an administrative role since 2015.

Sources:

1. Fort Wayne Community Schools, Towles Intermediate School, Our History and Meet the Principal: the 2006 opening, the Geyer building, the namesake, feeders and programs.
2. Fort Wayne Community Schools, Board Minutes, 13 February 2006: the Geyer conversion and the Paulding Road house purchase.
3. Ben F. Geyer Junior High School, The Blazer yearbook, 1960: the 16 November 1959 opening and Cecil Rice.
4. University of Kentucky, Notable Kentucky African Americans Database: Jeff Herman Towles, the first African American board president.
5. Fort Wayne Newspapers, obituary of Jeff H. Towles, M.D., January 2004: the surgeon and the Vernon Jordan operation.
6. National Center for Education Statistics: the Paulding Road address and 600 students, 2024-25.