Beverly Hills High School - Beverly Hills, California/CA

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Beverly Hills High School

241 Moreno Dr., Beverly Hills, CA, 90212-3639 -

tel: (310)229-3685
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Definition of Terms

Beverly Hills High School

School Level

High school

Grades Offered

Grades 9 - 12

County

Los Angeles County, CA

Awards

Blue Ribbon School – Selected in 2004

Students & Faculty

Total Students

2362 students

% Male / % Female

48% / 52%

Total Classroom Teachers

100 teachers

Students by Grade

Grade 9 - 634 students

Grade 10 - 658 students

Grade 11 - 535 students

Grade 12 - 535 students

This School

( CA ) School Average

Teacher : Student Ratio

1:24

1:20

Students by Ethnicity

This School

( CA ) School Average

% American Indian	n/a	1%
% Asian	19%	11%
% Hispanic	4%	45%
% Black	5%	7%
% White	69%	33%
% Unknown	3 %	4%

Additional Student Information

This School

( CA ) School Average

% Eligible for Free Lunch

n/a

44%

% Eligible for Reduced Lunch

n/a

10%

% Migrant Students Enrolled

n/a

( CA ) Statewide Testing Performance

School Statewide Performance

View Education Department Test Scores

School District Name

Beverly Hills Unified School District

This School's Agency

( CA ) District Average

Number of Schools Managed	6	4
Number of Students Managed	5,297 students	1,785 students
District Total Revenue	$62,748,000	$16,194,000
District Expenditure	$65,291,000	$16,545,000
District Revenue / Student	$11,846	$8,848
District Expenditure / Student	$12,326	$8,162
District Graduation Rates	n/a	n/a

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 is located on the west side of Beverly Hills, at the border of the Century City area of Los Angeles. Beverly, which serves all of Beverly Hills, 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.
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, Real Women Have Curves, and It's a Wonderful Life, 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 a smaller than Olympic-sized swimming pool. The clear glass backboards originated on this court as did the orange color on the basket hoops.
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.
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 PEG requirments for cable companies (free access by Public Access, Education, Government entities in the community). KBEV airs the longest running high school news program in the country, The Norman Newservice, now The Norman News, and has received two Telly Awards. Highlights, the school's newspaper, has also won various awards for its reporting and writing.
Student Life in 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. . . ."
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, Swimming, 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."
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 in 2006 Beauty and the Beast. This year, the Spring Musical will be How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying. In addition, the performing arts department also holds smaller performances in the form of short plays.
The Madrigal Singers won a Gold Medal in 2006 at the Heritage Festival in Orlando, while the Minnesingers were awarded a Gold Medal in the San Francisco festival. During the 2006 spring break, Dance Company performed in the only sister city of Beverly Hills, Cannes, France.
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 Olympic 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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
Jack Abramoff; David Ascalon; Corbin Bernsen; Albert Brooks; Michael Burkett, a.k.a. Fat Mike, (NOFX, Me First and the Gimme Gimmes); Nicolas Cage; Weston Cage, Nicolas Cage's Son; Lil Romeo; Shaun Cassidy; Richard Chamberlain; Liz Claman; Bryan Dattilo; Michael Douglas; Frank Drew; Richard Dreyfuss; Jakob Dylan; Nora Ephron; Travis Fine; Carrie Fisher; Joely Fisher; Rhonda Fleming; Bonnie Franklin; Gina Gershon; Crispin Glover; Joel Grey; David Kushner; Angelina Jolie; Daryn Kagan; Julie Kavner; Michael Klesic; Lenny Kravitz; Monica Lewinsky (did not graduate from BHHS: she transferred to a private school); Amy Linker; Maria McKee; Percy Miller Jr. aka Lil' Romeo (currently attending); Erik Menendez; Lyle Menendez; Breckin Meyer; Frank Morriss; Laraine Newman; Nick Oleksiw; Andre Previn; Rain Pryor; Rob Reiner; Ariel Rosenberg aka Ariel Pink; Antonio Sabato Jr.; Robert B. Sherman; Richard M. Sherman; Pauly Shore; Jonathan Silverman; Alicia Silverstone; Dr. Margaret Simons; David Schwimmer; Marlo Thomas; Peter Tomarken; Tracy Torme; Edward Tufte; Katie Wagner; Jill Whelan; Betty White; Kelli Williams; Daniel Yergin; Youth Brigade (Mark Stern, Adam Stern, and Shawn Stern).
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.
Source: Wikipedia; it is used under the GNU Free Documentation License. You may redistribute it, verbatim or modified, providing that you comply with the terms of the GFDL
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About This Zip Code (90212)

School Zip (90212)

(CA) State Average

Population (Approximate)

11,347 people

33,137,211 people

% (age 25+) w/College Degree

66%

32%

Population Average Age

40 years old

33.3 years old

Average Household size

2.0 persons

2.9 persons

Median Household Income

$61,039

$49,006

Avg. # of Rooms in Household

4.1 rooms

4.8 rooms

Median Age of Housing Structure

61 years old

39 years old

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Median Value of Housing Unit
Zipcode (90212)

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% Owning / % Renting

27% / 73%

58% / 42%

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Nearby Schools:


1. Moreno High Continuation School - 25 students - view location
2. Cheviot Hills Continuation High School - 73 students - view location
3. Hamilton (alexander) Senior High School - 3401 students - view location
4. Whitman Continuation High School - 64 students - view location
5. Indian Springs Continuation High School - 66 students - view location
View all schools in: Beverly Hills Town, Los Angeles County, Zip 90212

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Note: Data has been gathered from several government and commercial data sources. School data reflects years 2002-04 statistics (most recent years available). Area and demographic data reflects year 2000 statistics. Public School Review does not ensure the timeliness or accuracy of the information on this site.

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