This is a long overdue tribute to one of our City’s true giants, Mrs. Rachelle Marcus, who will soon be completing her term as President of the Beverly Hills Unified School District’s Board of Education.

Over the last several decades, Mrs. Marcus has made uniquely positive and constructive contributions to our community.

To some degree, this discussion is entirely unnecessary as Mrs. Marcus cannot walk more than a few steps through our neighbor hoods without being greeted by a former student or a parent of a former student or a grandparent of a former student. I experienced this phenomenon first hand recently when I walked in her wake from the Nosh to her unmissable bright blue Lexus NX (“blue is my favorite color” she explained) on Bedford Drive.

Some background is appropriate. Mrs.

Marcus grew up, the daughter of a pharmacist and the niece of pharmacists on the southside of Minneapolis, Minnesota (where there were very few Jewish families). Before she was known to everyone in Beverly Hills and beyond as Mrs. Marcus, she was Rachelle Beugen. She says that she was a “tomboy”, a reference to the fact that she was a kid who played sports in the streets with the youngsters of the male persuasion. This proclivity earned her a broken nose from pickup football and chronic knee problems from playground basketball. (Who knew?)

Arguably more notably, she was the valedictorian of the Washburn High School class of 19??.

This academic success brought her to California for the first time as she took a long train ride from Minneapolis to attend

UCLA where the out of state tuition was $150 per semester. That proved a bit pricy for the family so after two years, she returned home a finished her undergraduate education at the University of Minnesota.

Field of study? Physical education but with an extensive if informal pharmacy background.

In the early 1960’s, she returned to California and started her teaching career at Horace Mann Elementary. As a PE teacher she enjoyed great success as a coach who taught her students’ teams winning strategy and also instituted a folk dancing program that was popular with both students and their parents.

However, after nearly 15 years of teaching PE, she was compelled by the intervention of her medical team and school administration to get off the playgrounds to save her knees. She went back to school, was credentialled as a science teacher and taught science to generations of BHUSD elementary school students.

In 2013, Mrs. Marcus was honored for 50 years of service at BHUSD. Her son and daughter attended Beverly Hills

Schools from K through Grade 12 during that half century. Now, her twin grandchildren attend Beverly High.

Taking stock, Mrs. Marcus had been a teacher, on the playground, in the classroom, on the stage for folk dancing and gymnastics, a parent and then grandparent with children in the schools, an AYSO and

Little League coach, an assistant principal at Hawthorne and Horace Mann and head of a science program, called Project Wild initiated in all of the schools. In short, Mrs.

Marcus had done everything one could do for BHUSD except the windows (and I’m not sure about that).

In 2018, she decided, at the insistence of her legion of admirers, to run for election to the Board of Education.

She said that there were two related reasons. With the student population in the District, there was no need for four elementary schools. These could be rationally reconfigured so that there would be two elementary schools and a middle school. If this was done, there could be larger class sizes which could offer better educational opportunities and achieve corresponding efficiencies and cost savings. Not surprisingly, she was by far the top vote getter.

Now, after two terms, Mrs. Marcus will end the formal part of her career with the schools of Beverly Hills when her current term ends at the end of 2026. She will not run for re-election. She explains: “I will miss active formal involvement with the District but I feel that the time has come for me to step down.”

Service on the Board of Education has been gratifying for Mrs. Marcus but not without disappointments. Important accomplishments include the successful re-configuration of the schools, the adoption of a strategic plan and monitoring it and the re-opening of school facilities that had been under construction for far too long.

She candidly acknowledges that her term as President of the Board of Education has been challenging. She has been disappointed that the members have not been as collegial and open to listening to other points of view as she would have hoped. She notes that over the decades of supervising students in the class rooms and on the playgrounds, she never had occasion to send a student to the principal’s office. Had that opportunity existed during the past year’s Board meetings, she may not have been able to resist the temptation to avail herself of it.

Looking forward, Mrs. Marcus believes that a top priority is to materially increase the academic ratings of the schools. This is important for a number of reasons including retaining the children of residents who leave the District for private schools.

She emphasizes that our schools have faculty, facilities and programs that provide educational opportunities that are second to none.

She points out that there are several things that we can do that will improve the performance of our students that will materially affect the rankings of the schools.

First and foremost, we must change the mindset of some of the students who do not pursue four year universities out of high school but, rather, settle for community colleges as an end point or a stepping stone to a UC school or other local college.

These students believe that admission to a community college is easily achieved so why bother working hard in high school.

Thus they do not stretch themselves, do not take full advantage of the opportunities available to them such as honors courses and this lack of effort is reflected in other metrics that affect school rankings.

Mrs. Marcus is a strong advocate of the existing permit program that admits the grand children of Beverly Hills residents to our schools and favors expanding it.

She would expand eligibility to other relatives and would put more emphasis on admission to the middle school and the high school.

Another priority is to control the use of artificial intelligence and harness it to improve, not undermine the educational process.

These precinct and sensible ideas illustrate the reasons that we will miss Mrs.

Marcus’ direct involvement. But we can take solace in the fact that, bad knees and all, we will have her around for a long time.