Through good times and bad, a community takes pride in its high school students. To close a high school program is to deprive local residents of a slice of their communal identity. It is not something to be taken lightly.

But the good times left Duquesne when the steel industry faltered in the old mill towns of the Mon Valley. The bad times have been so bad since then that now the community must face up to the fact that better days will not come soon enough, if they ever come, to rescue its kids.

In the best judgment of the state Department of Education, the older ones need to go somewhere else to school if they want to seize a better future. The high school program has to close. The saddest thing is that, from a rational point of view, there seems to be little or no choice.

It fell to state Education Secretary Gerald Zahorchak to make this plain in a community meeting in Duquesne on Tuesday night. He outlined a couple of steps he is taking to shut down the high school program. (There is no separate high school building in Duquesne; the high schoolers are housed in a portion of a building that also accommodates other students).

First, he is asking the state board of control to vote at its June 5 meeting to end the program. Then, he intends to go to the state Legislature and ask for the authority to assign Duquesne high school students -- maybe as many as 250 next year -- to high schools outside the district. The Duquesne district will continue to educate kids in grades K-8.

Dr. Zahorchak, a former principal and superintendent, takes no pleasure in what he is doing and understands the community's feelings. But he also recognizes the remorseless logic of the situation and that his final obligation is not to maintaining a failing program but to helping the students enrolled in it.

The facts cast a long, grim shadow and suggest few sunny options. The state has been involved in Duquesne since 2000 when the community was declared fiscally distressed -- it was already academically distressed -- and a three-member board of control was appointed to oversee its operations.

Duquesne is still financially distressed and academic achievement still lags. The Education Department's cost analysis for keeping the status quo in the 2007-08 school year shows expenditures exceeding revenue (not including special state funds) by $1.8 million. It has $17.9 million of debt and its debt service is $1.5 million a year. The basic arithmetic remains: This is a district without sufficient tax revenues to sustain itself. It is a slowly dying patient on a state-run ventilator.

Theoretically, the district could continue to wheeze on its artificial life support, but the losers would continue to be the district's high school students. In Duquesne, students don't have the advantage of doing AP/college credit course work in courses that could help in the college application process. The best students in neighboring districts -- unlike their counterparts in deprived Duquesne -- can take college-level courses in English, calculus, biology, chemistry, physics and U.S. and European history.

While the Pittsburgh School District has been helpful in providing management expertise to Duquesne recently, Mr. Zahorchak has gone to the heart of the problem. This may be the first time that a secretary of education in Pennsylvania has proposed closing a high school program.

His proposal comes almost guaranteed to invite opposition given the legislative hurdles it must cross. Neighboring school boards, their constituents and members of the Legislature in the area may not want their school districts to have outside students forced upon them.

But as no one likes closing a high school program, the critics of this plan would do everybody a favor by suggesting a remedy that goes beyond failure as usual in Duquesne.

Of course, legislators could finally address the inequities of public school funding in Pennsylvania that allow rich districts to prosper and the poor ones to struggle. If they are not going to do that, they should support Secretary Zahorchak and work out ways that the moves can be done as humanely as possible.

Mr. Zahorchak does not take the prospect of closing this high school program lightly. He has paid the school community the honor of taking its plight seriously.