Beverly Hills High School

Beverly Hills High School (usually abbreviated as "Beverly" or as "BHHS") is the only major public high school in Beverly Hills, California. The other public high school in Beverly Hills, Moreno High School, is a small alternative school located on Beverly's campus.

Beverly is part of the Beverly Hills Unified School District and located on 19.5 acre on the west side of Beverly Hills, at the border of the Century City area of Los Angeles. The land was previously part of the Beverly Hills Speedway board track, which was torn down in 1924. Beverly, which serves all of Beverly Hills, was founded in 1927. The original buildings were designed by Robert D. Farquhar in the French Normandy style. The school also receives its funding from its on-campus oil tower.

History
Beverly Hills High School was originally in the Los Angeles City High School District. On March 23, 1936, the Beverly Hills Elementary School District left the Los Angeles City High School District and formed the Beverly Hills High School District; by operation of law this became the Beverly Hills Unified School District.

Awards and recognition
During the 1999–2000 and 2004–05 school years, Beverly Hills High School was recognized with the Blue Ribbon School Award of Excellence by the United States Department of Education, the highest award an American school can receive. Newsweek ranked Beverly Hills High School as the 267th best public high school in the country.

Student demographics
In 2008, Beverly Hills High School had 2,412 students: 70% Caucasian, 17% Asian, 5% African-American, 4% Latino. In 2014, the student body was 72% white, 16% Asian, 6% black, and 5% Hispanic. Some television shows like Beverly Hills, 90210 have been criticized for not accurately portraying the student body. The student body is, as of 2008, predominantly Jewish. Many students are Iranian Americans, the majority of whom at the school are also Jewish. Due to the large number of students of Iranian origin, the school has historically scheduled a staff development day on or around Nowruz.

About 35% of Beverly's current student body was born outside the United States, and 41% of its students speak a first language other than English.

Student life
The 1988 non-fiction book Hard Lessons by Michael Leahy documents the life of six Beverly seniors for a full school year. In 1984, Beverly had a 100% graduation rate but three students committed suicide. These suicides piqued Leahy's interest in Beverly, and in 1985 he began writing Hard Lessons.

Leahy had heard many stories about Beverly having intense academic pressure, rampant cocaine abuse, and being a "den of hedonism." However, after speaking to Beverly students he concluded that sex and drug abuse were neither higher nor lower than other local high schools. Beverly's social attitudes and morals were also nearly identical to these schools. Leahy did note that Beverly's academic pressure was unusually high which led to cheating and high anxiety amongst students.

In the media
Beverly has been featured in many films and TV shows, either as part of the plot or a filming location. Many movies, including Clueless, Real Women Have Curves, Whatever It Takes, The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer, and It's a Wonderful Life, featured a scene in Beverly's unique "Swim Gym," perhaps the only gymnasium that has a basketball court that can split open to reveal a recreational-sized, 25 yd swimming pool. The gym in Beverly Hills High was used in the video for boy band NLT's That Girl.

The front of Beverly High was shown in a short clip of Nickelback's music video for their song Rockstar, although it only shows the part that reads "Hills High School" (the "Beverly" portion was cut off). The school was also in the cartoon show Totally Spies!, and it was often called "Bev High" for short. The book series The A-List follows a group of privileged teenagers and young adults from Beverly Hills, many of them who attend Beverly Hills High School and come from entertainment families and are known for their proactivity.

Initially, the producers of the 1990s television drama Beverly Hills, 90210 wanted the show to be set at Beverly Hills High School, and the show to be filmed on Beverly's campus. The Beverly Hills school board declined both requests. So, the TV producers created the fictional "West Beverly Hills High School" (or "West Beverly") and the show was filmed at Torrance High School, in Torrance, California. "West Beverly" is a clear reference to Beverly, because Beverly's campus is located on the western border of Beverly Hills. The fictional school, East Beverly Hills High School was in the book series The Privileged Life.

Enrollment controversies
The Beverly Hills Unified School District has faced controversies in student enrollment, mainly regarding diversity, and more recently, legacy enrollment (alumni preference).

For many years Beverly has selected high-achieving students from twelve LAUSD middle schools on diversity permits in an attempt to increase the number of minorities enrolled. Selections have been made based on test scores, grades and writing samples. According to enrollment data for the 2006–2007 school year, however, seven out of ten students who entered the school this way were of Asian ethnicity. In April 2007 due to pressure from parents and activist Earl Ofari Hutchinson, who criticized the school for not recruiting more African-American and Latino students, Superintendent Kari McVeigh agreed to extend the application deadline until April 27, as reported in the Los Angeles Times and the Beverly Hills Courier, hoping that more students from these minority groups would seek to enroll. According to the Beverly Hills Courier (May 25, 2007), "civil rights leaders hailed the final student selections" as "an honest effort to obtain ethnic diversity."

The school board voted 3–2 in the spring of 2008 to offer the children of alumni, who live outside the district's boundaries, preference in enrollment. The intended purpose is to influence these alumni to support the school district regarding bond measure or tax issues and fund-raising. Critics protest that, while legacy preferences are long established and constitutional for institutions of higher education (colleges and universities), legacy enrollment in public schools is anti-democratic, constitutionally questionable, and subvert public education to the benefit of the wealthy.

News services
BHHS has two award-winning news services. KBEV-Channel 6 is a student-run television channel that began in 1974 on Theta Cable as part of the Public, educational, and government access (PEG) Channels requirements for cable companies (free access by Public-access television, Education-access television and Government-access television (GATV) entities in the community). KBEV airs the longest running high school news program in the country, The Norman Newservice (now The Norman News). The program has hosted important guests such as Ronald Reagan in the past.

Highlights, the school's newspaper, has also won numerous awards for its reporting and writing. In October 2007, Highlights won first place in the 13th Annual California State University Northridge Journalism Skills Competition, with a total of seven out of twelve possible awards in news writing, feature writing, opinion writing, sports writing and photojournalism. The Highlights staff recently took home awards from the national JEA conference in St. Louis, Missouri. In April 2009, the Highlights staff ranked 3rd place among the nation in Phoenix, Arizona. In addition to regularly winning individual awards at the JEA/NSPA fall and spring conferences, Highlights placed seventh in the nation at the 2011 Minneapolis conference in November.

Athletics


The Beverly Hills High School "Swim Gym" was designed by Stiles O. Clements and built in 1939 as a New Deal project. It features a basketball court that opens to reveal a 25 yd-long swimming pool underneath. It is featured in It's A Wonderful Life as the location of the dance. Sports including volleyball, basketball, wrestling, swimming and water polo can all be played in this facility. Beverly offers the following sports:


 * Baseball
 * Basketball
 * Cheerleading
 * Cross Country
 * Dance
 * American Football
 * Golf
 * Lacrosse
 * Soccer
 * Softball
 * Swimming
 * Tennis
 * Track and Field
 * Volleyball
 * Water Polo
 * Wrestling

BHHS's stadium is a multipurpose facility that is used for football, soccer, baseball, lacrosse, and track and field.

Of the 86 football teams throughout the course of Beverly Hills High School's history, BHHS varsity football has won 12 state championships.

Beverly Hills' big rivalry is with Santa Monica and Culver City.

Performing arts
Beverly Hills High School has a Performing Arts Department that attracts casting directors, writers and producers to attend performances and to visit classes to speak with the students.

Each year around late March to early April, the school holds its annual musical performance by performing arts students. The chair of the performing arts department was Herb Hall, also famous for his one line in the movie "Clueless". Many of these musicals are based on Broadway award-winning musicals. BHHS is also famous for its Theater Acting Workshop, where only Juniors and Seniors who audition get in. Nicolas Cage once enrolled in this class, as did his son Weston Cage. BHHS also has an almost 200 member marching band. The BHHS marching band has been selected to perform at Disneyland several times recently. About 300 worldwide marching bands audition every year and only 20 get accepted. The BHHS marching band was under the direction of Richard Farmer (1978-2009), and now is under the direction of Bill Bradbury.

BHHS now has a very successful competitive Winter Drumline. The BHHS Drumline is in its second competitive season. They compete in the SCPA and WGI circuits. The BHHS Drumline has performed such shows as "A Tour of Technology: The Inner-Workings of a Computer" and "Censor State: The State, The Conceded, The Resistance".

Beverly Hills High School also has two award-winning groups, the Madrigal Singers (a chamber choir) and Minnesingers (currently an all-women's choir). Both groups have won a wide range of awards for their performances, usually at Heritage Festivals. They have traveled across the United States to well-known locales such as San Francisco, Las Vegas, New York, Chicago, Orlando, Washington, D.C. and even internationally to Mexico, France and New Zealand. Additionally, in December, both groups go Christmas caroling to raise money for their festival trips. The groups were founded by Robert Holmes, who also helped found the Idyllwild School of Music and the Arts Summer Music Festival see Idyllwild Arts Summer Program. The choral groups were led by the late Joel Pressman from 1975 to 2013.

BHHS's Dance Company is renowned for their success in dance. They hold annual shows in January, which they practice for immediately when the school year starts. A few years ago, the Dance Company traveled to its sister school in Cannes, France, where they were invited to perform. BHHS also has a hip-hop group, AP Posse, which performs in between Dance Company numbers.

Oil wells
A cluster of 19 oil wells in a single "drilling island" on Beverly's campus, owned by Venoco, Inc., can easily be seen by drivers heading west on Olympic Boulevard toward Century City. The oil wells have pumped much of the oil from under Beverly's campus, and many have been slant drilling into productive regions of the western part of the Beverly Hills Oil Field under many homes and apartment buildings in Beverly Hills for decades.

As of May 2006, the Beverly Hills High School wells were pumping out 400 oilbbl to 500 oilbbl a day, earning the school approximately $300,000 a year in royalties.

In the late-1990s an art studio run by two Beverly High Graduates volunteered to cover the well enclosure, which at that time was solid gray in color, with individual tiles that had been painted by kids with cancer. The studio created the design and drew the lines on the tiles, but children painted the tiles in between the lines. The studio made the design rather abstract: the design consists of random shapes on different-colored backgrounds. A ceremony inaugurating the design was held in 2001.

Beverly gained more notoriety when Erin Brockovich and Ed Masry announced having filed three lawsuits in 2003 and 2004 on behalf of 25, 400, and 300 (respectively) former students who attended Beverly from the 1970s until the 1990s. In April 2003, the Texas-based lawfirm of Baron & Budd partnered with the law office of Masry & Vititoe to lend its expertise in lawsuits related to health risks of volatile chemicals. The number of actual cancer claims filed in Santa Monica was ninety-four.

The lawsuits claimed that toxic fumes from the oil wells caused the former students to develop cancer. The oil wells are very close to all of Beverly's sports facilities, including the soccer field, the football field, and the racetrack. Beverly students—not just athletes but students taking required physical education classes from the 1970s until the 1990s—were required to run near the oil wells.

The city, the school district, and the oil companies named as defendants disputed this assertion, claiming that they had conducted air quality tests with results showing that air quality is normal at the high school. In 2003, the University of Southern California Keck School of Medicine published a "Community Cancer Assessment Regarding Beverly Hills, California" which failed to support Masry's claims.

After receiving complaints about Beverly's oil installation, the region's air-quality agency investigated Venoco Oil (doing business as Venoco, Inc) and in 2003 issued three Notices of Violation regarding the operation of the drilling island. Venoco, Inc's penalty settlement included requirements that the company maintain continuous air quality monitoring at the high school, and prevent any oilfield gas (which is primarily methane gas) from being released into the atmosphere.

On December 12, 2006, the first 12 plaintiffs (of over 1000 total) were dismissed on summary judgment because there was no indication that the contaminant (benzene) caused the diseases involved and the concentrations were hundreds to thousands of times lower than levels associated with any risk. In Fall of 2007, the plaintiffs agreed to pay the School District and the City up to $450,000 for expenses from the lawsuits. This payment of expenses is without prejudice to any of the plaintiffs in the case, which is on appeal.

The oil wells may have inspired a 1991 episode of the sitcom Saved By the Bell titled "Pipe Dreams." In it, oil is discovered at fictional Bayside High School in Pacific Palisades, California. There's excitement about the financial possibilities, but when a company comes in to drill, the character of Jessie realizes that it could be detrimental to the local environment.

In June 2004 Beverly Hills Courier Editor Norma Zager was named "Journalist of the Year" in the Los Angeles Press Club's Southern California Journalism Awards competition for her coverage of the Erin Brockovich-Edward Masry lawsuit. Two books about the oil wells and lawsuit have been published, "Parts Per Million: The Poisoning of Beverly Hills High School" by Joy Horowitz was published in July 2007 and "Erin Brockovich and the Beverly Hills: Greenscam" by Norma Zager was published in October 2010.

Notable alumni
BHHS has a number of famous alumni, many of whom are entertainers, the children of entertainers or other prominent people. In addition, many famous people have taught at the school; soap opera actor John Ingle taught the drama and acting program at the school from 1964 to 1985. While Beverly Hills High School alumni are known predominantly for their connections with the entertainment industry, BHHS has also produced well-known scholars in many scientific disciplines.


 * Jack Abramoff (born 1959), convicted felon, political activist and businessman, central figure in high-profile political scandals.
 * Mark Anchor Albert (born 1961), prominent Los Angeles-based attorney, philanthropist, and impresario; founder of the Queen of Angels Foundation
 * Christian Alexander (born 1990), actor
 * David Ascalon born 1945), sculptor
 * Lloyd Avery II (1969–2005), actor
 * Jon Robin Baitz (born 1961), screenwriter, producer
 * Edward Bass (born 1967), producer, director, writer, actor
 * Corbin Bernsen (born 1954), actor
 * Jonny Blu (born 1980), singer, songwriter, pop star in China
 * Jacqueline Briskin (born 1927), author
 * Albert Brooks (born 1947), actor, director
 * Michael John Burkett (born 1967), punk musician bassist for NOFX
 * Steve Burton (born 1970), actor, appeared in General Hospital
 * Nicolas Cage (born 1964), actor
 * Shaun Cassidy (born 1958), actor and singer
 * Richard Chamberlain (born 1934), actor
 * Liz Claman (born 1963), reporter
 * Jackie Cooper (1922–2011), actor and director
 * Roger Corman (born 1926), director and producer
 * Jamie Lee Curtis (born 1958), actress
 * Elizabeth Daily (born 1961), voice actress and musician
 * Bryan Dattilo (born 1971), actor
 * Frank Drew (born 1930), Brigadier General
 * Richard Dreyfuss (born 1947), actor
 * Nora Ephron (1941–2012), film director and producer
 * Travis Fine (born 1968), actor, director and screenwriter
 * Carrie Fisher (born 1956), actress, author
 * Joely Fisher (born 1967), actress
 * Todd Fisher (born 1958), actor, director, cinematographer, architect, and museum director
 * Tricia Leigh Fisher (born 1968), singer
 * Rhonda Fleming (born 1923), actress
 * Michèle Flournoy (born 1960), Under Secretary of Defense for Policy
 * Allen Fox (born 1939), tennis player (ranked as high as # 4) and coach
 * Josh Flagg (born 1985), Realtor, star of Million Dollar Listing
 * Bonnie Franklin (1944-2013), actress
 * Nolan Frizzelle (born 1921), California State Assemblymember (1980-1992)
 * Ronald M. George (born 1941), Chief Justice of California (1996–2011)
 * Gina Gershon (born 1962), actress
 * Crispin Glover (born 1964), actor, director
 * Jonathan Gold (born 1959), food critic
 * Josh E. Gross (born 1973), publisher of Beverly Hills Weekly
 * Raymond Gutierrez and Richard Gutierrez, twins, actors
 * Ken Harvey, professional baseball player (Kansas City Royals)
 * Taylor Humphries (born 1976), writer, producer
 * Angelina Jolie (born 1975), actress, director
 * Jay Jennings (born 1965), writer, director
 * Tiger JK (born 1974) lead hip-hop rapper of Drunken Tiger
 * Daryn Kagan (born 1963), reporter
 * Ryan Karp, professional baseball player (Philadelphia Phillies)
 * Julie Kavner (born 1951), actress
 * Michael Klesic (born 1975), actor
 * Jenji Kohan (born 1969), TV writer, producer, creator of Weeds
 * Tony Krantz (born 1959), TV producer, 24
 * Lenny Kravitz (born 1964), singer-songwriter
 * Christopher B. Landon (born 1975), screenwriter
 * Katherine Kelly Lang (born 1961), actress, The Bold and the Beautiful
 * Serge Lang (1927–2005), mathematician
 * Logan Lerman (born 1992), actor
 * Mel Levine (born 1942), Congressman (1982-1992)
 * Monica Lewinsky (born 1973), noted for relationship with Bill Clinton, (not a BHHS graduate – transferred to Pacific Hills School)
 * Amy Linker (born 1966), actress
 * Gabriel Macht (born 1972), actor, "Suits_(TV_series)"
 * Leighton Meester (born 1986), actress
 * Breckin Meyer (born 1974), actor
 * Romeo Miller, rapper, basketball player
 * Frank Morriss, film and TV editor
 * Laraine Newman (born 1952), actress, comedienne
 * Georg Olden (born 1968), actor
 * Guy Oseary, manager for Madonna and U2
 * Elinor Ostrom, Ph.D. (1933–2012), winner of 2009 Nobel Prize in Economics
 * Spencer Paysinger (born 1988), professional football player
 * Ariel Pink (Ariel Marcus Rosenberg) (born 1978), musician
 * André Previn (born 1929), pianist, composer
 * Rain Pryor (born 1969), actress, comedienne
 * Max Rafferty (1917–1982), author, educator, politician
 * Edwin Reinecke, politician
 * Rob Reiner (born 1947), actor, director
 * Antonio Sabato Jr. (born 1972), actor
 * Peter Schiff (born 1963), author, entrepreneur, financial commentator
 * David Schwimmer (born 1966), actor
 * Robert B. Sherman (1925-2012), composer
 * Richard M. Sherman (born 1928), composer
 * Pauly Shore (born 1968), actor, comedian
 * Sam Simon (born 1955), cartoonist, screenwriter, showrunner
 * Jonathan Silverman (born 1966), actor
 * James G. Snitzer (1926-1945), actor, soldier
 * Bahar Soomekh (born 1975), actress
 * Candy Spelling (born 1945), author, TV personality
 * Amber Stevens West (born 1986), actress
 * Maria Tallchief (1925-2013), prima ballerina
 * Michael Tolkin (born 1950), filmmaker and novelist
 * Peter Tomarken (1942–2006), game show host
 * Tracy Tormé (born 1959), screenwriter
 * Edward Tufte (born 1942), specialist in interface design
 * Katie Wagner (born 1964), reporter
 * Betty White (born 1922), actress
 * Frank Wilkinson (1914–2006), civil liberties activist
 * Kelli Williams (born 1970), actress
 * Daniel Yergin (born 1947), author and economics researcher; works include The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power.
 * Youth Brigade (Mark Stern, Adam Stern, and Shawn Stern)