New Guides Offer Fresh Glimpses of L.A. Schools : Education: A result of Proposition 98, the ‘report cards’ cover 13 categories, including academic performance and average class size.

More than a quarter of the students at Taft High School, a school in the upper middle-class community of Woodland Hills that has won national academic honors, are Latino.

Nineteen percent of the students at North Hollywood High School earn A’s in their English classes, the same percentage as fail.

And San Fernando Junior High hands out 100 awards for student achievement each month and 1,006 awards for citizenship during each grading period.

Parents and prospective home buyers interested in informational tidbits such as those about San Fernando Valley schools could get them beginning Thursday by asking for “report cards” that every school in the Los Angeles Unified School District is supposed to have available. The detailed, six-page reports cover 13 categories that include academic performance, dropout rate and average class size.

The student accountability reports, part of the Proposition 98 school funding initiative approved by voters in November, 1988, are a consumers’ guide to the district, giving anyone interested in getting to know the district better a complete picture of individual schools.

Much of the information in the reports has been available from different sources, but this is the first time it has been compiled in one document, said Lu Hishmeh, a district administrative consultant who helped schools put the data together.

“The parents and the community should have those kind of facts and figures about our schools,” Taft Principal Ron Berz said.

The information in the reports is for the 1988-89 school year. The reports are available at individual school offices, and some principals said they will send the evaluations home with students.

But on the first day that the reports were to have been available, some school office workers were reluctant to release them. Others seemed not to be aware of the reports. District officials said they will tell regional superintendents at a meeting today that the reports are to be given to anyone who asks for them.

A random cross-section of San Fernando Valley schools shows that:

* High school enrollments appear to be declining while junior highs and elementary schools are growing. Enrollment at North Hollywood High School, for instance, has dropped from 2,500 in 1985-86 to 2,218 in 1988-89. Enrollment at Sylmar Elementary School has grown from 759 to 936 during the same period.

* Class sizes generally average between 26 and 32 students, at or below state guidelines.

* Suspensions and expulsions at Taft High School in 1988-89 were among the highest in the Valley. Suspensions numbered 533, and 23 students were expelled.

“We run a pretty tight ship here at Taft,” Berz said. North Hollywood suspended 245 students and expelled one. Birmingham High School in Van Nuys suspended 539 students but expelled none.

* Latino enrollment at San Fernando Junior High, which is 92.7%, is among the highest in the Valley.

Bob Plog, head counselor at Mulholland Junior High in Van Nuys, said he thought that the evaluations were a good way to introduce parents to the nuts and bolts of a school, but the best way to evaluate a school is to visit it.

“Casual observation is not shown on the report,” he said.