Newport Harbor Hopes for a Better Grade : Funding: The Pacific Symphony and Opera Pacific also face re-evaluation this week by a California Arts Council panel that last year criticized them for insufficient community outreach efforts.

Newport Harbor Art Museum officials, reprimanded last July by a state arts panel for inadequate outreach efforts, hope to come away smiling this week when the issue comes up for re-evaluation in Sacramento.

Today through Thursday, the California Arts Council will convene a panel of arts professionals to judge leading arts organizations’ outreach and education programs. The panel will assign ratings on a 1-to-4 scale, which the council will consider later this year when it decides who gets grants for 1991-92.

Four Orange County institutions--South Coast Repertory, the Pacific Symphony, Opera Pacific and the museum--have budgets of $1 million or more and therefore are subject to the panel’s scrutiny.

All but South Coast Rep were cited for insufficient outreach last year but none more than the museum, whose rating dropped from 3-plus to 2. Officials were criticized for a decrease in ethnic representation among trustees and staff, and for the appearance that the institution was reaching out only to the nearly all-white population of Newport Beach, where it is located. As a result, the museum’s grant tumbled from $59,386 to about $19,000.

Panelists further recommended that the museum report quarterly to the CAC on all its programs.

“The quarterly reporting has been a way to demonstrate there has been a continued and ongoing commitment to outreach programs,” Kathleen Costello, the museum’s associate director of development, said last week.

Among the year’s activities, Costello said, were a pilot program of signed tours for the hearing impaired, and the creation of subcommittees, composed largely of members of the community, to advise the museum on how to improve and increase services to Latinos and Asians.

The number of minority trustees did not increase this year (it remains at three; total membership of the board is 30), but minorities on the paid administrative staff increased from zero to two, Costello said.

Museum director Michael Botwinick said the facility is “actively recruiting leadership among California’s various cultures. It understands its responsibility and will continue to actively seek multicultural involvement in the museum.”

The Pacific Symphony, whose rating dropped by half a point last year, also was cited for having too few minority trustees. The number has been raised this year, from two out of 48 to four out of 37, according to Louis G. Spisto, executive director.

Spisto said the orchestra also eliminated a Christmas program aimed at Latinos that, panelists complained, had included traditional seasonal pop songs only. Instead, this year the orchestra played music by Latino composers.

Opera Pacific, whose rating also slipped by half a point, had been taken to task for an illustration on promotional material for a children’s opera, “Monkey See, Monkey Do,” that panelists said reflected a negative view of Latinos. Panelists further said that, overall, the opera’s outreach activities were modest and “not notably innovative.”

Stephen Rapp, the company’s director of community programs, said that this year Opera Pacific presented 376 outreach concerts throughout Orange County (there had been 149 last year), and that it has two bilingual children’s productions in the works, one about the ecological perils of development and the other about child abuse. The offending illustration has been eliminated, Rapp said.

South Coast Repertory last year won the highest outreach ranking among 27 groups statewide, a 4-minus. This year it will be given only a brief review; the troupe is taking part in a program aimed at cutting down paperwork by giving applicants the option to keep its rating for two years.