School Crime Report Findings in Doubt : Education: Significant differences in how principals approach discipline may skew the figures.

Discrepancies in the way individual schools report crime raise doubts about the accuracy of the state’s statistics on crime in Los Angeles city schools, according to police, education officials and records obtained by The Times.

The state’s report on campus crime, scheduled for release Tuesday, is expected to show increases in the number of assaults at Los Angeles city schools during the 1988-89 school year. But education experts say significant differences in how school principals approach student discipline may skew those figures one way or another.

Some administrators favor the arrest of students suspected of minor crimes, while others are more likely to impose punishments such as detention, litter pickup or suspension, actions that allow crimes to go unreported.

There are, for example, large and surprising differences in the number of assaults reported at San Fernando Valley high schools during the 1988-89 school year, according to figures obtained directly from school police.

Canoga Park High School reported no assaults on any of its 2,000 students or staff. San Fernando High School reported three assaults. By comparison, Grant High School in Van Nuys reported 17 assaults and Taft High School in Woodland Hills reported 20 assaults.

“I can’t imagine any metropolitan high school having no assaults,” said Grant assistant principal Daniel Gruenberg, who is in charge of student discipline. “Either they have chosen not to report them or there is a mistake.”

Canoga Park High School Principal Charles Molina said the reason for his school’s clean record is that “the kids get along very well.”

Los Angeles Police Department Detective Stan Miller, who works in the jurisdiction responsible for juvenile crimes in Canoga Park, credited the school with good security and rapport between students and the resident school police officer.

But he added, “knowing that area and the ethnic mix of the students, I am sure that there are some fights on campus . . . but we have no statistics to back that up.”

Assaults reported at San Fernando High School dropped from 18 to three and total reported crime was cut nearly in half since Bart Kricorian took over as principal in 1984. “Nothing magical in what we are doing,” he said. “Students know we are tough in our discipline.”

The report by the state Department of Education tabulates assaults against students and school employees, as well as property crimes such as theft, burglary and vandalism. In all, 22 categories of crime were measured for every California public school and compiled into county and school district totals.

The purpose of the state crime survey, established by the Legislature in 1984, is to help the public to assess the safety of its schools.

But the numbers supplied to the state by the Los Angeles Unified School District are often the product of reporting standards that vary, sometimes dramatically, from school to school.

“There is no method or section in the law that allows anybody at the state to require uniformity among schools,” said Bill Rukeyser, a spokesman for the state Department of Education. “Local standards determine what gets reported. One school writes up graffiti as a case of vandalism and another school classifies it as a part of daily life and it never gets into the books.”

Even school police differ in the way they react to campus crimes, district officials say. Although district policy requires the arrest of students suspected of committing felony crimes, such as armed assault, lesser crimes are sometimes left unreported by officers who dislike the paper work involved, as well as the long waits needed to process suspects, district administrators and police officials say.

“Some officers may see something as an assault that needs to be reported, while others may see the same thing as a tiff between two students that need not be listed,” said Harriet Williams, administrator of operations for the district’s senior high school division and a 37-year district veteran.

LAPD Detective Miller, who is in charge of the juvenile unit at West Valley Division, said the decision to seek formal charges against students suspected of crimes is similar to choices faced by others in law enforcement.

“It’s no different than a Los Angeles policeman and how many tickets they write,” Miller said. “It’s how they want to write them. Some don’t like writing tickets and some will write up anything that moves. Some school administrators and police officers are the same way.”

Finally, an unknown number of students who are victims of crime fail to press charges because they fear retaliation from their assailants, district Police Chief Wesley C. Mitchell said.

“With no victim, there is no crime,” Mitchell said.

As a consequence, the differences in the number of crimes reported at high schools with similar numbers of students can be dramatic.

Reported property crimes--including vandalism, arson, burglary and theft--range from a low of 12 at Canoga Park High School to 79 at Cleveland High School in Reseda during the 1988-89 school year, district records show.

Taft High School, in an upper-middle-class section of the Valley, reported 17 incidents involving possession of weapons during the 1988-89 school year. Canoga and North Hollywood high schools reported one such incident each during the same school year.

Los Angeles district officials say they have compiled a more accurate--and frightening--measure of the rise in campus violence than the state crime survey. They report that 438 students were punished for bringing weapons to school or assaulting someone with a weapon at school during the 1988-89 school year, a 29.5% increase over the previous year when 338 such cases were reported.

Concern by parents, teachers and students over increasing school crime erupted last year in the wake of the classroom stabbing of a junior high school English teacher by one of her students in Sylmar. A month earlier a teacher in La Crescenta disarmed a 13-year-old boy who waved a loaded .357 magnum in class.

Those incidents prompted the appointment of a district committee to study campus violence. In a report issued last month, the committee was especially critical of the low percentage of students expelled after being caught with weapons at school. Almost all of the students were given a second chance at another school.

The Board of Education is expected to hold a hearing on the report’s recommendations today, but it is unlikely that the financially strapped district of 610,000 students can afford to do much more about school crime.

Budget officials have recommended that the board cut 10 school police positions and eliminate jobs for 93 campus security aides, an estimated savings of $1.48 million. So far, the board has approved $113 million of $170 million in cuts that budget officials estimate are needed to balance the district’s 1990-91 budget.

The cutbacks, especially in campus security, come as more and more students experience the effects of campus violence.

Besides the increase in armed assaults during the 1988-89 school year, the state report will show an increase in overall crime at the district’s junior high schools, said the district’s police chief, who described them as the “leading grade configuration for social deviancy.”

Despite the discrepancies, improvements in the crime reporting system--prompted by criticism from district police chiefs including Mitchell--were put into place last July for the 1989-90 school year, state officials said. One of the changes separates assaults from schoolyard fights.

State officials said improvements in coming years to the reporting system will make the annual survey more useful in comparing district crime rates. For now, the statistics are useful only for tracking changes from year to year at individual schools and school districts, officials said.

“There is a supposition that if a school or a district applies one yardstick to reporting in 1988, chances are it is going to use the same yardstick in 1989,” said Rukeyser. “But that isn’t guaranteed either.”

Times staff writer Michael Connelly contributed to this story.

CRIMES IN VALLEY HIGH SCHOOLS For 1988-89 school year

reported assaults on weapons School students/staff/others possession (guns) Reseda 5/3/0 7 (1) Cleveland 13/5/1 10 (3) Birmingham 9/4/0 19 (5) Taft 18/2/0 17 (4) El Camino Real 5/3/0 7 (0) Grant 13/3/1 13 (2) Van Nuys 1/0/0 9 (1) Canoga Park 0/0/0 1 (0) N. Hollywood 3/0/0 1 (0) San Fernando 1/2/0 6 (2) Monroe 3/2/0 12 (5) Chatsworth 6/3/0 9 (1) Kennedy 3/0/0 4 (1) Granada Hills 10/5/1 13 (0) Verdugo Hills 7/6/0 13 (2) Francis Poly 7/1/1 11 (7) Sylmar 10/3/3 7 (2)

property crimes School (vandalism) Reseda 27 (16) Cleveland 79 (51) Birmingham 46 (26) Taft 35 (21) El Camino Real 34 (14) Grant 41 (16) Van Nuys 30 (11) Canoga Park 12 (6) N. Hollywood 26 (17) San Fernando 62 (46) Monroe 48 (33) Chatsworth 61 (26) Kennedy 41 (32) Granada Hills 39 (21) Verdugo Hills 44 (30) Francis Poly 41 (35) Sylmar 42 (25)