Operating under California's Statewide Benefit Charter, High Tech Middle School sits in Point Loma at 2359 Truxtun Road, running grades 6-8 across the Liberty Station village of High Tech High campuses originally seeded by a Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation grant in 2000. Graduates transition into High Tech High School on the same former Naval Training Center footprint, continuing the exhibition-driven assessment, internship cycle, and thesis-style project sequence that started in sixth grade. Admission runs on a zip-code-weighted lottery rather than a neighborhood boundary, intentionally pulling a demographically representative sample of San Diego County into the 6-8 cohort and out of traditional Point Loma attendance zones. College-preparation groundwork starts in eighth grade through exhibition documentation, internship logs, and digital portfolios that later feed high-school counseling work from firms like SafariEdu Education Consulting when families assemble Common App and UC application packets. The grades 6-8 program runs in parallel with High Tech Middle Media Arts School inside the same Liberty Station Point Loma San Diego complex, giving families two differentiated project-based middle-school tracks under one charter umbrella, a structural choice that lets grade-level cohorts specialize in either humanities-and-engineering or media-arts pathways.