Martin Luther King Jr. Educational Campus

Coordinates: 40°46′29″N 73°59′06″W / 40.774692°N 73.985015°W / 40.774692; -73.985015

Martin Luther King Jr. Educational Complex
Memorial sculpture by William Tarr

The Martin Luther King Jr. Educational Campus is a five-story public school facility at 122 Amsterdam Avenue between West 65th and 66th Streets in the Lincoln Square neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City, near Lincoln Center. The campus is faced on Amsterdam Avenue by a wide elevated plaza which features a self-weathering steel memorial sculpture by William Tarr.[1] The same steel, called Mayari R, was used by architect Frost Associates in the curtain wall of the building,[1] the interior of which has an 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.

History

The building was formerly the location of Martin Luther King Jr. High School, which opened in 1975. According to The New York Times, the school had been troubled throughout its history, gaining a bad reputation for its construction delay, planned curriculum restructurings, low student enrollment, and abysmal academic performance:

Construction of the school took longer than anticipated, so the first students were temporarily housed on a floor of a junior high school in Chelsea that had a bad reputation. By the time the building finally opened… a number of middle-class parents had pulled their children out in disgust. Less than three years after the school opened, the Board of Education attempted to restructure it into a performing arts school with selective admissions. But the plan was scrapped when parents accused the board of trying to drive poor minority students out of the building and insulting the memory of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. Tensions mounted again in the early 1980's [sic], when the board proposed merging King, which was underenrolled, and Brandeis, on West 84th Street, and creating a vocational curriculum. But again, parents revolted and the plan fell through. As the city created smaller, specialized high schools and magnet programs in the 1990's [sic], King often drew students who were not motivated enough to apply to those. It remained an academic disappointment.…

Since the late 1980's [sic], the school has had a number of institutes that students must apply to: one in law and social justice, for example, and another in cultural arts. The hope was to attract more eager students, but educators familiar with King say that since it is still one big school, too many students fall through the cracks and too many, scared off by its size and reputation, enroll elsewhere.[2]

It has a history of violence, including the shooting of two tenth grade students inside the school on January 15, 2002, the birthday of Martin Luther King Jr. Other violence had occurred in the school:

In 1997, six students were charged with sexually assaulting a 13-year-old girl in a boys' bathroom. In 1992, a group of young men attacked two students with a pipe and a machete outside the building. And in 1990, a 15-year-old student was shot in the stomach by another student inside the school.…[In 2002, there were] 10 reported cases of weapons possession at the school, twice as many as during the same period last year, according to police statistics.[2]

The closing of the school was included by Chancellor Joel Klein and Mayor Michael Bloomberg in the education reform policy. The school was closed on June 27, 2005 by the New York City Department of Education.

Current configuration

The high school has been replaced by seven separate high schools which operate on different floors of the building. Students wear uniforms to distinguish them from the other schools and have separate lunch and dismissal times. The schools, listed by the date of their entry into the campus, are:

References

Notes

  1. 1 2 White, Norval & Willensky, Elliot (2000), AIA Guide to New York City (4th ed.), New York: Three Rivers Press, ISBN 978-0-8129-3107-5, p.323
  2. 1 2 "Latest Shootings Add to King High School's Reputation for Turbulence", New York Times, Jan. 17, 2002
  3. ↑ http://insideschools.org/index12.php?fso=1439&all=y
  4. ↑ http://insideschools.org/index12.php?fso=1324&all=y
  5. ↑ http://insideschools.org/index12.php?fso=1335&all=y
  6. ↑ http://insideschools.org/index12.php?fso=1471&all=y

Further reading

Official websites:

nyc.gov websites:

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