One-Third of Students Claim Cocaine Use : Santa Clarita: Hart school district officials question the findings in part because surprisingly few in the survey report using alcohol.

More than one-third of junior and senior high school students polled in the Santa Clarita Valley claim that they have used cocaine at least once, according to a new survey to be presented to school officials today.

But the survey, commissioned by the William S. Hart Union School District, produced figures so perplexing--depicting not only much higher cocaine use than expected, but startlingly low alcohol use--that district officials seriously question whether they are true.

Half of the high school seniors polled in 1989 said they had used cocaine at least once during the 30 days before the poll was taken. In a similar survey by the University of Michigan, however, only 3% of seniors polled across the nation said they had used cocaine in the 30 days preceding that poll.

Moreover, only 10% of the Santa Clarita Valley seniors said they had used alcohol in the 30 days before they were polled. Nationally, the figure was 60%.

District officials believe that students underreported the use of alcohol and, perhaps in a show of teen-age bravado, exaggerated their use of cocaine, Louise Robertson, coordinator of special programs for the Hart district, said Monday.

Most disciplinary problems involving drug and alcohol abuse in the district are with alcohol, not cocaine, Robertson said. Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies who reviewed the poll data also believed that the figures on cocaine were inflated, she said.

The poll was taken in October, 1989, and involved 86% or 8,457 of the district’s 9,754 students. The figures on alcohol and cocaine use were so strange that the district retained consultants to review the data. Problems with the consultants delayed presentation of the data.

A new consultant who prepared the final report concluded that many students lied on the survey; the consultant gave it a margin of error, plus or minus, of 15 to 25 percentage points.

With such an unusually large error margin, the cocaine use figure for seniors could be anywhere from 25% to 75%.

Results were also skewed by students who improperly filled out the survey forms.

For example, about 1,000 students did not respond to basic questions such as age, sex, grade level or ethnicity.

But Robertson said the survey is still useful because it will provide a basis for comparison when an identical poll is conducted this fall.

And aside from the extreme responses about cocaine and alcohol, most results agreed with the expectations of district officials and local law enforcement, she said.

Some of the poll’s findings:

* Twenty-one percent of all students said they had used marijuana in the four weeks before the poll was taken. Among Hart seniors, the figure was 20%, not far off the nationwide figure of 17% for seniors.

* Only 40% of all students said they believed that cigarette smoking was bad for their health. Another 22% said they were unsure.

* Eighty-six percent of all students agreed that “all drugs should be made legal and freely available.”

* About 67% of all students and 82% of seniors said it would be easy to obtain cocaine.