Manhattan Village Academy (MVA) is a small, public high school located in the Flatiron District, New York City.

After selecting the site in a commercial loft building in the Chelsea district of Manhattan, Butz persuaded nationally known architect Beverly Willis to collaborate with her to design the space for the school.

Butz recruited the students and faculty, and shaped the culture of the school around the ideas of "reason, respect, and responsibility."

In 2016 a 17-year-old student who had been bullied at the school left campus at lunchtime, stepped in front of a subway train, and was fatally struck.

The designs for the school were completed in 1996 within a time period of 12 months[3][4] Conceived as an alternative to the traditional high school, the Manhattan Village Academy was a replacement to the “old, assembly-line model of education with more active and personalized learning.”[5] The New York Times hailed the academy as having “the intimate feel of a private liberal arts high school.”[6] The design by architect Beverly Willis created a customized program to fit the school's pedagogy and to support the administration, teaching, and learning process.

Willis devised a locus plan− “a cluster of classrooms for each grade around an interior quad space, where teachers have a selection of a variety of spaces to fit a personalized approach to their students’ needs.”[7] At the Manhattan Village Academy, “the educational philosophy is embedded in the architecture.”[8] In addition to the reconfiguration of the classroom layout, Willis rejected the original plan's main entrance at the rear, adjacent to the freight exit.

Instead, Willis designed “a grand high school faced in miniature; just inside the doors, four Greek-temple steps, done in marble, ascend to an aluminum spiral staircase, leading to the school’s second floor lobby.”[9] The open space of the locus plan center accommodates up to 100 students and is surrounded by three interconnected classrooms and a science laboratory with a folding wall that opens up to one of the classrooms.

The design incorporates glass walls and office windows that look out onto corridors and common areas to allow for continuous monitoring of student activity.