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, then-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." In 2012, the school board voted not to issue new inter-district permits for the upcoming school year, which discontinued those out-of-district students who could apply for special permission to attend BHHS.
Subway tunnel underneath school In 2008, voters approved a half-cent increase in the sales tax in order to expand the
L.A. subway system. The so-called
D Line Extension would build out the subway through Beverly Hills at an estimated cost of $2.5 billion, adding seven new subway stations. Ultimately, the new extension – called the “Subway to the Sea” – would connect downtown’s
Union Station to the Pacific Ocean in Santa Monica, with the first phase going as far west as the West LA/Veteran's Administration station, just west of the 405 freeway. The next year, Beverly Hills voters elected
Lisa Fisch Korbatov to the Board of Education, where she later served as president. For nine years, until she left office at the end of 2018, Korbatov led the school board and Beverly Hills city officials to oppose the expansion of the subway tunnel beneath BHHS, citing worries about explosions, carcinogens from seeping fumes, and even a possible terrorist attack. The City of Beverly Hills also unsuccessfully sued the subway project in court, in an effort to prevent it from building a tunnel underneath BHHS. The high school is built over an oil field (which at the time was still active) and is located near an earthquake fault, so the city and school contended that the tunnel would pose a safety threat to students and faculty. Despite over $15 million expended on the litigation, much of it funded from school improvement bonds, the use of which was questioned by a citizens' oversight committee, the District was ultimately unsuccessful and on May 18, 2020, Judge George H. Wu ruled in favor of Metro, holding that it had satisfied the requirements of the National Environmental Policy Act in documenting its choice of route.
Oil wells A cluster of nineteen oil wells in a single "drilling island" on Beverly's campus 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 to 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. 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 and in 2003 issued three Notices of Violation regarding the operation of the drilling island. The penalty settlement included requirements that Venoco 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 the fall of 2007, the plaintiffs agreed to pay the School District and the City up to $450,000 for expenses from the lawsuits. 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-Ed Masry lawsuit. In 2017, Venoco filed bankruptcy and was liquidated. By January 2021 the oil wells were plugged and capped, and the derricks had been demolished. ==Student life==