The San Diego Unified School District’s Board of Education should reject the staff recommendations to close two middle schools: Pacific Beach Middle School, and either Dana or Correia in Point Loma. These are not merely school closures, but drastic realignments of the entire educational system in those two clusters. Such a radical change should not be undertaken just to save a buck, without any educational rationale or even any study of the educational impacts.  In the Mission Bay cluster, district officials are proposing to eliminate the middle school entirely and combine grades 7 through 12 on the Mission Bay High School campus. The six-year high school is a concept that was abandoned by most of American education several generations ago, for sound educational and developmental reasons. Before going back to it, there should be a real evaluation of the idea, and the community and educators should be given a chance to buy into it or reject it. It should not be imposed by fiat from downtown for purely financial reasons.  In Point Loma, the district is proposing to destroy a unique alignment that has produced some of the highest-achieving middle schools in the district. (Dana Middle has the highest API score of any of the schools proposed for closure.) Currently, all fifth- and sixth-graders in the Point Loma cluster attend Dana Middle as a transition from elementary to secondary education, while seventh- and eighth-graders attend a traditional middle school at Correia. This highly popular system was developed with a lot of community input, and the results show how effective it is in educating these grades. Again, the district staff is proposing to blow up this system without any thought to the educational effect of the change. All fifth-graders would be sent back to the elementary schools, increasing their student bodies by 25 percent (this includes the effect of an elementary school closure which is also proposed for the cluster). The remaining 7-8-9 middle school would have to absorb a 50 percent increase in its enrollment. The district’s own figures show that the elementary schools and the remaining middle school would not have the capacity for such an increase.  We all know the district has serious financial problems, but let’s solve them is a way that is smart and fair. Go ahead and close elementary schools, where the students can be dispersed into nearby elementary schools without drastically realigning the entire educational system of the cluster. And spread the closures out more fairly throughout the district. The current plan puts half of the closures into just two clusters, Point Loma and Mission Bay. That’s not fair and it’s not right.