Martin Luther King, Jr. High School (New York)

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For other high schools named for Martin Luther King, Jr., see Martin Luther King High School.

Martin Luther King, Jr. High School was a public high school located on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in New York City, near Lincoln Center. Its last graduating class was the class of 2005. The school was subsequently closed by the New York City Department of Education due to a history of low performance, as part of Chancellor Joel Klein and Mayor Michael Bloomberg's education reform policy.

The decision to close the school was made in 2002. In that year, two small, themed high schools were founded within the Martin Luther King campus as administratively separate units from the main school. The Martin Luther King, Jr. High School for Law, Advocacy and Community Justice and the Martin Luther King, Jr. High School of the Arts and Technology (both have since officially dropped the "Martin Luther King" name) were started as an effort to salvage the main high school, which had been plagued with low test scores, a high dropout rate, and incidents of violence.

In addition to the original two small schools, the five-story building formerly occupied by the main school, now known as the Martin Luther King, Jr. Educational Campus, was joined in 2003 by the Manhattan/Hunter Science High School, in 2004 by the Urban Assembly School for Media Studies, and in 2005 by the High School for Arts, Imagination, and Inquiry. Although it was founded in 2004, the Manhattan Theatre Lab High School did not move into the building as its sixth school until 2006. The addition of this last school was opposed by some parents of the other five, as before the move each school was able to occupy an entire floor, no more and no less.

The campus is fronted on Amsterdam Avenue by a wide elevated plaza. The building is rectangular and has an unusual arrangement of perimeter corridors with floor-to-ceiling windows, leaving many classrooms on the inner side windowless. The school is across West 65th Street from Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts.