In Denver the junior highs were turned into middle schools, so they were the same buildings–exactly the same buildings. None of the junior highs were attached to a high school. Some of the grade schools were, however, attached to a junior high/middle school.
When my older kids were in school, some of the schools were split into grades 1-2-3 with a sister school teaching grades 4-5-6. About the time they decided to throw the 6th-graders (who were mostly 11, not 12) into middle school, they restructured some of these to be K-1-2 and 3-4-5, which didn’t make a lot of sense. Then they restructured some of the middle schools into K-8, and that turned out to be really popular (anyone can choose any school, but some schools fill up faster).
Where it falls down, in my opinion, is 9th graders. Ninth-graders are 14, a lot of them are still little kids. My son was so intimidated by being on a baseball team with grownups–seniors, who were bigger, faster, stronger–that he gave it up. (I guess he didn’t believe that in a couple of years he would also be bigger, faster, stronger.) In general a lot of the high school freshman looked really small compared to the rest of the students. Of course some of them remained small for a couple more years, but…
Back in my day, 9th grade was the best, because we were high school freshman, but we were at the top of the pecking order in junior high. Most of the people I went through school with considered 7th grade the absolute worst, but 9th grade redeemed things for them. So we all have kind of bad memories of junior high, except for ninth grade. Whereas my kids have fond memories of middle school but hated high school all the way through, because 9th grade was so bad and things did not get better. (Actually I have one still in high school, so there’s still a chance, but things aren’t looking good for nice memories of high school.)
I moved from an area with a 7-8-9 Junior High and went to a place with a 7-8 Middle School in 1989. The shift was definitely occurring then. I think the place I moved from was set to go 6-7-8 the year after I left.
My town (in MA) was:
1-6 Elementary school (we had 4, later 3 as populations declined)
7-8 Junior High
9-12 High School
I looked on the website yesterday and they still call 7-8 Junior High but it appears to be set up like a traditional middle school, with teams. It wasn’t like that when I attended in the late 70’s, we were on the High School model.
In my school district, the division was:
Elementary School - K-6
Junior High - 7-8
High School (aka Senior High) - 9-12
When I started Junior High in 1990, I was under the impression that it was a junior high because it only had grades 7 and 8, whereas a middle school also included 6th grade. But the following year, my school (and the other junior high in the district) was suddenly called a middle school instead, and has been ever since. They still have just grades 7 & 8.
Most other school districts in my area (suburbs of Buffalo, NY) are the same, although there is one that has a division like this:
K-2 - Primary School
3-5 - Intermediate School
6-8 - Middle School
9-12 - High school
I went to middle school, but when my dad and his siblings went there it was the junior-senior high school. Then, they built the high school in the 70s and the Jr-Sr became middle (6-9 I think?). I don’t think there was ever a junior high school besides the combined one, but one of the middle schools in the county is attached to the high school and is called a middle school. The county school system has pre-K through 5 elementary, 6-8 middle, and 9-12 high, and has been that way since the early 90s (for pre-K at least, older brothers had headstart instead) when I started school.
In 1976, the setup in my school district was:
Elementary, K-5th
Sixth Grade Center, 6th
Jr. High, 7th-8th
High School, 9th-12th
Yep, 6th graders had a whole school just to themselves. I don’t know what the rationale there was.
Sometime after 1982, the Jr High became a middle school for 6th-8th grades.
Somewhere around 81-82, I changed school districts. The old district was still using the jr. high system, so it made sense to pull me out of that district at the end of 6th grade. The new district, however, was already on the middle school system, so I started there in 7th, which meant everyone else had already known each other for a year (having been fed in from many different elementary schools), and I had to catch up with the social scene.
Another district in my hometown approached it totally differently. They had a jr. high that was 7-8-9 and the high school was 10-11-12. Which I thought was weird.