Beverly Hills High School
| Beverly Hills High School | |
|---|---|
| Location | |
 | |
| , | |
| Information | |
| Type | Public |
| Motto | Today Well Lived |
| Established | 1927 |
| Principal | Joseph Guidetti |
| Grades | 9–12 |
| Enrollment | 2,400 |
| Color(s) | Black , Orange , and White |
| Mascot | Normans |
| Newspaper | Highlights |
| Yearbook | Watchtower |
| Website | bhhs.beverlyhills.k12.ca.us |
Beverly Hills High School (usually abbreviated as "Beverly" or rarely 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.[1]) Beverly is part of the Beverly Hills Unified School District and is located on the west side of Beverly Hills, at the border of the Century City area of Los Angeles. Beverly was founded in 1927.
Academics
Beverly Hills High School, on 2004, was honored as one of the schools in the No Child Left Behind-Blue Ribbon School Program. Blue Ribbon Schools Program.
Diversity
About 2400 students currently attend Beverly Hills High School. About 35% of Beverly's current student body were not born in the United States, and over half of Beverly's students speak a first language other than English. Many of these students are from Iran, or are of Iranian descent. There are also many students from South Korea, Israel, and Russia, as well as from many other countries and language backgrounds. [2] [3]
The student body is heavily Jewish, including a large percentage of the students of Iranian descent.[4]
In the media
In the media, students of Beverly Hills High School are typically portrayed as absurdly affluent. For example, in the fictional version of Beverly in the film version of The Beverly Hillbillies, robots serve students gourmet coffee in the hallways.
Beverly has been featured in many movies, including Clueless[5] , Real Women Have Curves, and It's a Wonderful Life [6], which featured a scene in Beverly's unique swim gym, perhaps the only swim gym that has a basketball court that can split open to reveal an Olympic-sized swimming pool.
Beverly has been featured in cartoons, including Beverly Hills Teens. The French animated series Totally Spies! also takes place at "Bev High."
West Beverly Hills High School
Initially, the producers of the 1990s television drama Beverly Hills 90210 wanted the show to both take place at Beverly Hills High School, and the show to be filmed on Beverly's campus. The Beverly Hills school board didn't allow the producers to do either, so the 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.
Student Life in the 1980s
Perhaps the most recent published book on student life at Beverly is Hard Lessons: Senior Year at Beverly Hills High School, by Michael Leahy. Published in 1988, it is a comprehensive book that followed Leahy's socioligical study of Beverly students in the mid-1980s. In 1984 Beverly had a 100% graduation rate, but three students committed suicide. Leahy "heard so many stories of excruciating academic pressure, cocaine abuse, and drifting children," that he decided to study the High School's student body, by interviewing students, parents, and teachers. He followed the lives of six Beverly seniors, from the day they started school until the day they graduated in 1985.
Leahy wrote "It did not take long during my conversations with Beverly students before I understood that their world was nothing like the one I had imagined from casually observing teenage behavior in malls and at rock concerts. After that initial shock, the task became to listen to students long and carefully enough until I adequately understood the panorama of life at Beverly." Leahy learned that in spite of the media's typical portrait, Beverly was "not a den of hedonism." Leahy observed that "Social attitudes and mores appear to be nearly identical to those found in the middle-class high schools of the Los Angeles Basin and the San Fernando Valley -- the evidence of drug and alcohol use no more or less high, the discussion of sex and birth control equally as obsessive."
Still, Beverly's academic and social pressures did create problems in the mid-1980s. Leahy quotes a teacher who said in 1985, "The admired kid here is not necessarily the good-looking athlete. The possibility of success in the future is important to someone's overall attractiveness. Kids are already planning their law practices or where they might set up their businesses. Sometimes you can't see their problems through that act of maturity they put on for you. If they're not well adjusted, then that illusion can be a real problem, because some of them are facing pressures that they don't know how to cope with. Your whole worth here, in these kids' eyes, is determined by how well you're doing academically and socially. A 'C' is a horrible grade to them, a failing grade. Sometimes a 'B' is, too. There's been a lot of cheating. The anxiety is only growing worse."
According to the 1985 editon of the school year book, "The Beverly Pursuit is the path to success. . . . One wrong move, and the student could be traveling in endless circles. Sure, he will have a chance to roll again, but he will have to take advantage of every opportunity. Sometimes a student will land in the wrong square, but he must be patient. Someday he will be able to cash in all his chips and reach the center of attention. Of course, everyone wants a piece of the pie. If a student does not have the right moves, he will go hungry. . . ." [7]
News services
BHHS has two award winning news services: KBEV, the first student TV news broadcast channel in the nation as well as the longest running one. During the 2005-2006 school year Ackbar's Documentation, a recent KBEV television production, won two prestigious Telly Awards. Highlights, the school's newspaper, which has also won various awards for its reporting and writing.
An online, non-school affiliated publication, the Beverly Underground, is also maintained by several students of Beverly Hills High School. [8]
Athletics
The Beverly Hills High School "Swim Gym" was designed by Stiles O. Clements and built in the 1930s as a New Deal project. It features a basketball court that opens to reveal an olympic sized swimming pool underneath. Sports including volleyball, basketball, swimming and water polo can all be played in this facility. Beverly offers the following sports:
- Baseball
- Basketball
- Cheerleading
- Cross Country
- Football
- Golf
- Lacrosse
- Soccer
- Softball
- Tennis
- Track and Field
- Water Polo
- Wrestling
Performing arts
Beverly Hills High School claims that its Performing Arts Department is "nationally famous for the quality of its musical and theatrical productions and for its famous alumni," and the school claims that the department "is highly visible in the industry, with casting directors, writers and producers attending performances and visiting classes to speak with the students."[9]
Each year around late March to early April, the school hold its annual musical performance by performing arts students. Many of these musicals are based on broadway award winning musicals such as Anything Goes, Fiddler on the Roof, The Music Man, Hello Dolly, and most recently Beauty and the Beast. In addition, the performing arts department also holds smaller performances in the form of short plays.
The Madrigals, Beverly's "varsity choral group", won a Gold Medal in 2005 at the Pacific Basin Music Festival in Hawaii, while the Minnesingers group was awarded gold medals in the New Orleans and Anaheim festivals. During the 2006 spring break, the dance company performed in the only sister city of Beverly Hills, Cannes, France.[10]
Many Beverly Hills residents are connected to the entertainment industry, which accounts in part for the national reputation of the school's performing arts department.
Oil well
Owned by the Venoco Oil Company, an oil well on Beverly's campus can easily be seen by drivers heading west on Olymic Boulevard towards Century City. The oil well has drilled most of the oil out of Beverly's campus, and has been slant drilling under many homes and apartment buildings in Beverly Hills for decades.
As of May 2006, the Beverly Hills High School well was pumping out 400 to 500 barrels a day, earning the school approximately $300,000 a year in royalties [11].
In the mid-1990s, an art studio volunteered to cover the well, which at that point 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. The project's name was "Project 9856." [citation needed]
Beverly gained more notoriety when Erin Brockovich and Ed Masry 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. The lawsuits claim that toxic fumes from the oil well caused the former students to develop Hodgkin's lymphoma or cancer. The oil well is 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 well. The city, the school district, and the oil companies named as plaintiffs dispute this assertion, claiming that they have conducted air quality tests with results showing that air quality is normal at the high school. [12][13]
After receiving numerous complaints about Beverly's oil well, the region’s air quality agency investigated Venoco Oil and in 2003 found the company guilty of violating three air pollution regulations. Venoco's punishment included a requirement that the company maintain continuous air quality monitoring at the high school.[14]
Notable alumni
BHHS has a number of famous alumni, many of whom are well-known entertainers or the children of entertainers or of other celebrities. In addition, many famous people have taught at the school; soap opera actor John Ingle taught the drama and acting program at the school for twenty years.
School trivia
- Beverly used to hold its senior prom at the Beverly Hills Hilton Hotel, but Beverly now has its prom on the backlot of Sony Pictures Studios.