The curriculum, staffing and other logistics of reconfiguration at the Beverly Hills Unified School District continue to come together for next school year, the district’s first with a 6-8 middle school and two K-5 elementary schools.

“There isn’t any person or any thing in our school district that isn’t impacted by reconfiguration,” Superintendent Michael Bregy said during a school board study session on March 6. “Lots of moving parts and one thing oftentimes impacts not only one thing but several other things.”

Under the new configuration, K-5 students at El Rodeo School, which will close in June for two years of construction, will move to Hawthorne School; K-5 students at Beverly Vista will move to Horace Mann School. All 6-8 grade students will move to Beverly Vista School. As part of the school board’s October vote to approve reconfiguration, district administration has assembled a series of subcommittees to assist with the details. One of those committees, a Brand Advisory Committee tasked with exploring a name change for Beverly Vista, was disbanded.

The long-term future of the K-5, 6-8 configuration will be evaluated when El Rodeo is close to reopening. It could become a third K-5 school, or part of another configuration the board wants to consider.

Declining enrollment and statewide changes to funding for public schools have contributed to the cuts in programming since the district was last recognized as one of the best in the country. It ranked No. 11 in a 2018-19 list of best Los Angeles area school districts compiled by data aggregation site niche.com, based on metrics such as graduation rates, state test scores and college readiness.

Noah Margo, president of the school board, said the community has been more receptive to the impending changes. In the two years preceding the board’s vote, many parents attended school board meetings to urge the board to keep the four K-8 schools intact.

“Reconfiguration is no longer a bad word, which means the conversation is changing and the culture is shifting,” Margo said.

Listening tours will be held for parents to share their favorite aspects of their current schools that can be carried over to their new schools.

“Beverly Hills is rich in tradition and we’ve had these schools for 100 years,” said Juliet Fine, principal at Horace Mann. “And we don’t want to lose any of those aspects.”

District administration has also cited declining enrollment and a resulting overstaffing of teachers as one of the main factors limiting academic offerings, particularly in the middle school grade levels. The new configuration is designed to address those issues.

School board member Rachelle Marcus, a longtime teacher in the district before her election to the Board of Education last November, said she’s happy it’s moving forward. So is school board member Tristen Walker-Shuman, who served on the district’s Future Focused Schools Team that recommended a switch to a consolidated middle school.

“We knew when we were looking at this a little bit more than a year ago what the possibility were, but to actually see all of it and have it almost at the point when we can touch it, when we’re really able to implement this and make this great change is just incredibly gratifying,” she said.