Ranch Hills High School is nestled into a bucolic, chaparral hillside, surrounded by rolling hills of shrubs and thorny bushes, typical of Southern California's wild, native landscape. The school is built on 72 acres of land once considered unusable due to the nature of the rural surroundings and impracticality of building on several steep slopes, according to Alice Kim of Architecture Week (2000). After collaboration between the City of Pomona and the Pomona Unified School District, two years of grading, $12 million in soil work, and $31 million in building expenditures, Ranch Hills High School officially welcomed students into portable classrooms in 1997 and after two additional years of construction, opened its main campus to students in…