Ex-Beverly Hills High Principal to Head District : Education: Acting Supt. Sol Levine, who helped keep the schools open during last year’s strike, keeps the job he has been doing since June.

The Beverly Hills Board of Education has named Sol Levine, a key figure during the 13-day teachers’ strike last year, to succeed Robert French as superintendent of the Beverly Hills Unified School District.

Levine, a longtime principal of Beverly Hills High School, has been doing the district’s top job since June, when he was named acting superintendent after French’s unexpected retirement.

“The Board of Education has made a well-thought-out and conscientious decision not to endure the long and tedious undertaking and the costly expense of a search for a new superintendent when we have the person right here . . . who is the best possible person for the job,” school board President Frank Fenton said Wednesday. The board decided on the appointment at its meeting Tuesday night.

Fenton said Levine would be able to “hit the ground running” as the district faces severe budget cuts in the wake of the failure at the polls in June of a parcel tax referendum intended to increase school funding.

An honors graduate of Brooklyn College in New York, from which he also holds a master’s degree in history and education, Levine came to Beverly Hills as principal of the high school in 1977.

The author of “U.S.A.,” a high school history textbook, he was named assistant superintendent in charge of curriculum in 1989, just in time for the October teachers’ strike, when he was instrumental in organizing the district’s effort to keep the schools open.

The strike ended Nov. 1, when teachers narrowly approved an offer of a 12% increase in salary, over two years.

“He was sleeping there sometimes . . . fielding calls from 5 a.m. to 10 o’clock at night,” said school board member Dana Tomarken, who was president of the board at the time.

“He was very instrumental in settling the strike, meeting with the teachers, and he’s been instrumental in all the major decisions and been on the front line over the years,” she said.

He was also in charge of a complete overhaul of the high school curriculum several years ago, Tomarken said.

Levine, 58, said Wednesday that he is “very, very thrilled and excited by the appointment. . . . I just feel that we’ve got a great community, a great teaching staff and great kids, and those are the ingredients you need to maintain a top-flight school district.”

He said he saw the district’s financial problems as a challenge and added, “I’m very, very optimistic.”

Representatives of the Beverly Hills Education Assn., which represents the district’s teachers, were not available for comment.

The school district, which is scrambling to maintain its traditional high standards at a time when funding is largely determined by the state, had hoped to raise about $4.5 million a year through a parcel tax proposal that was put to the voters in June. The proposal fell just four votes short of the two-thirds majority needed for approval.

The measure would have assessed property-owners between $250 and $750 a year, depending on the size and use of their land parcels.

The 4,700-student district also receives about $5 million in city funds and receives hundreds of thousands of dollars a year from parent contributions and revenues from an oil well on the Beverly Hills High School campus.

The failure of the parcel tax measure forced the district to eliminate 41 teaching-level positions for the 1990-91 school year, including counselors, librarians, nurses and teachers, Levine said.

Thirty-five non-teaching positions were also eliminated, but no more layoffs are expected in the immediate future, he said.

“One of the major tasks we have is to take the dollars we have and maintain the top-quality educational program we’ve always had,” he said.

Levine, father of three grown daughters, lives in Van Nuys with his wife, Marilyn. He said he is “very involved” in writing books, including a historical novel “having nothing to do with Beverly Hills.”