Metro staff have recommended that the Westside Subway Extension tunnel under part of the Beverly Hills High School. An assertion repeatedly made by Beverly Hills officials in recent months is that there are no schools or school buildings with train tunnels under them (here are a pair of examples, one from the media, one from an elected official in the comments section).

This is not true but the assertion keeps getting made in various forms. It is a topic worth revisiting, given the Metro Board of Directors’ hearing requested by Beverly Hills that is scheduled for Thursday at 1:30 p.m. at Metro headquarters. The hearing’s topic: the possibility of Metro tunneling parts of the Beverly Hills High School campus.

The following are four engineering schematics from Metro’s response to the latest report by Exponent, an engineering consultant hired by the city of Beverly Hills. As the schematics show, tunnels for electrically-powered trains go under or near school buildings and property — and they do so in Los Angeles.

Esperanza Public Elementary School and Camino Nuevo Charter Academy in the Westlake district of Los Angeles are above the Red/Purple Line subway.

West Portal Elementary School in San Francisco is over tracks for the San Francisco Muni L line.

Rooftop K-8 Public Alternative School in San Francisco is over a train tunnel for the San Francisco Muni L and M lines.

The Northwest School, built in 1905, sits over train tunnels for the University Link light rail in Seattle.

There are rail tunnels and stations below schools in other U.S. cities, according to Metro. In California these include the Bentley School in Berkeley, East Sylvan Middle School in Portland, Ore., Jefferson Middle School in Washington D.C. and the Global Village School in Decatur, Georgia.