BHHS, Hawthorne Families Fight to Keep Murals

Students and parents from Beverly Hills High and Hawthorne took to the podium at Tuesday's Beverly Hills Unified School District board meeting to fight to keep their school murals from being removed. The board had voted to remove the murals at a meeting in August. The cost estimate for painting over the two murals is $1,500 to $4,500, money that several parents felt should be given to the high school's science labs or robotics team.

BHHS Associated Student Body President Layla Ferrahi spoke out in support of her school's mural.

"The mural means something to everyone. We see the mural and are proud to be Normans," she said. "We are told that we are great, but to be great, we must be proud."

Ferrahi also said that the mural symbolizes the school and should be maintained as art rather than painted over by the school district.

"How does this decision benefit the students?" one parent asked board members after Ferrahi's appeal. "I cannot think of a solitary way that painting over our knight and his fuzzy white steed would help them."

Not all Beverly Hills residents disagreed with the idea of removing the murals. Betsy Myers, a longtime resident, said there was a silent majority who looked forward to the murals' removal.

"They were put up without the knowledge of the neighborhood and look out of place. They degrade the school's dignity and clutter the eye line of the community," she said. "They are wrong for the district, wrong for the neighborhood, and wrong for Beverly Hills community's way of life."

In other board action Tuesday, the panel gave its unanimous backing to Rosa's Law, a bill passed by the U.S. Senate that would remove the term "mental retardation" from school documents and verbal usage, instead referring to special needs students as "intellectually disabled."

"It's always nice to do the right thing," said board member Brian Goldberg. "Now we have that chance."

Introduced in Maryland in 2009, the bill "is driven by a passion for social justice and a compassion for the human condition," according to Sen. Barbara Mikulski, who sponsored the legislation. The bill does not affect the current services or rights of disabled students, but regulates the language on internal and external school documents to remain consistent with that of the World Health Organization, the Centers for Disease Control and the President's Committee for People with Intellectual Disabilities.

Board member Myra Lurie expressed concern over the bill's unknown funding consequences and questioned whether certain students might be "deprived of services" if they weren't officially classified as "intellectually disabled."

Board member Lisa Korbatov said, "If people can go to the moon and walk on it, we can find a way to remove this term from our documentation."

When the board voted 5-0 in favor of Rosa's Law and said it planned to discuss the potential ramifications with legal counsel, the whole room applauded.