Beverly Hills schools call on Trump administration to strip Purple Line funding

The school board president launched a website blasting the project, and students are planning a districtwide walkout

By Jenna Chandler@jennakchandler Oct 11, 2018, 3:43pm PDT

The president of Beverly Hills Unified School District’s board of education helped build a website that blasts Metro’s subway to the Westside and urges the Trump administration to block federal funding for the project. ... The website, “Stop the Purple Threat,” claims constructing a subway underneath Beverly Hills High School will pose a danger to students. When the website surfaced over the summer, no one knew who was behind it. ... That changed Wednesday, when the Beverly Hills Weekly revealed that school board president Lisa Korbatov built the website herself, with help from lawyers and consultants.

The newspaper obtained a recording from an October 4 meeting, held at a private residence in Beverly Hills, where Korbatov, speaking to a crowd of about 75 people, acknowledges that the website “was put up by a professional organization... Myself and one or two lawyers and consultants, we loaded all the information.”

While the school district had tried repeatedly in court to stop Metro from building the subway underneath the high school’s campus, Korbatov’s “Stop the Purple Threat” campaign takes a different approach: Nab the attention of President Donald Trump and try to convince him to order the withdrawal of federal funding from the Purple Line extension.
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The students will not actually walk out of school and to the park, which is a 35-minute walk from campus, rather, they will be loaded onto buses and driven 1.7 miles to the walkout site, the Beverly Hills Courier reports.