Many Schools Plagued by Crime Rates Well Above State Average

Although most Orange County campuses are safe, scores of public schools here report crime rates far worse than the state averages for alcohol and drug use, thefts, vandalism and battery, a Times analysis has found.

At Tuffree Middle School in Placentia, for example, students were busted for drug and alcohol offenses 17 times last year--a rate five times the state average.

The confiscation of six weapons--mostly pocket knives--at Buena Park Junior High gave that campus the highest weapons possession rate among Orange County middle schools, three times the state average. The offending students, all boys, were caught at the rate of one a month during fall and winter.

Matters were even worse at an Anaheim elementary school. Benjamin Franklin Elementary reported seven knives confiscated during two months last spring, giving the school a weapons possession rate higher than the statewide average for high schools.

Orange County’s public schools are generally safe, statistics show. The Times analysis of 1997-98 school crime figures shows that elementary, middle and high schools in Orange County for the most part have lower crime rates than those statewide.

But the data reveal wide disparities from school to school and from crime to crime. Fifty-eight of the county’s elementary schools, seven middle schools and six high schools had crime rates above the state averages.

The findings startled Orange County Supt. of Schools John F. Dean, who wondered whether some “schools [are] being too meticulous about what they report.”

“If these are actual, factual reports for all the schools, I’d be concerned,” he said. “If I were principal of some of these [more crime-affected] schools, I’d look very carefully and say, ‘What’s going on? What’s our problem?’ ”

A safe school that diligently reports all incidents can appear more dangerous than a crime-plagued school with looser record-keeping. The statistics can also depend on how educators interpret state law. Schoolyard fisticuffs might be viewed as battery at one school and not at another.

Even so, the numbers offer the best snapshot available of school safety in California. They could take on new significance in the wake of recent school shootings in Colorado and Georgia.

With public and legislative attention focused on school safety like seldom before, California’s school crime reporting system--one of only a handful nationwide--provides officials a road map to crime-troubled schools and districts.

Since July 1995, school principals across the state have been required by law to report every instance of 20 different crimes that occur at their schools, at school-sponsored events off-campus or involving their students going to or from school.

The crimes are the same as those defined in the state Penal Code. They range from battery, the most frequently reported infraction, to vandalism cases involving damage of more than $100, the second most frequently reported crime.

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The Orange County campus-by-campus findings are the result of a two-month effort by The Times to collect and tabulate crime data for each of the area’s roughly 500 elementary, middle and high schools. It is the first such compilation of campus crime data in the state.

The data reveal that:

* Some of the Orange County schools reporting the most crime sit in middle-class, suburban areas--such as Huntington Beach and Laguna Beach--rather than in urban neighborhoods of modest means.

* A few of Orange County’s 58 comprehensive high schools posted more crimes than the state average. But the number of schools coming in above the state average was higher among the county’s 75 middle schools.

* Elementary schools showed the biggest differences in crime rates. One-third of the county’s 366 elementaries reported no crimes at all. Dozens of others reported crime rates that were double or triple state averages.

The overall crime rate at Las Palmas Elementary School in San Clemente, for example, was close to six times the state average. In fact, it was nearly 50% higher than the average crime rate for high schools. Contributing to its high crime rate were 16 separate instances of battery in which students attacked other students during school hours on campus.

School administrators at Las Palmas couldn’t put a finger on why their crime rate was so much higher than average, other than different styles of reporting.

The school’s two sexual battery offenses were likely little more than teasing, said Capistrano Unified School District administrator Ron Dempsey, because they were not serious enough to merit expulsions.

“I think the school is reporting crime consistently,” said Dempsey, the director of child welfare and attendance. “I suppose it’s analogous to when the Highway Patrol puts up an alcohol checkpoint and they write more citations because that area is targeted for enforcement. So is that stretch of road more dangerous because it has more citations? Probably not.”

Ken Lorge, who is in charge of both crime reporting and student discipline at the Placentia-Yorba Linda School District, said he was painfully aware of the incidents that gave Tuffree Middle School the worst rate in the county for drug and alcohol incidents during 1997-98 and the second worst for theft and vandalism.

In one instance, four boys were arrested for taking what they said was methamphetamine. In another incident, five students were caught sharing hard liquor smuggled onto campus in a bottle for iced tea. All were suspended.

The property crimes, Lorge believes, stem from the campus’ easy access, next to a public park. After a burglary involving nearly $3,000 worth of computers from a portable classroom at the school, the district instituted some new security measures that should reduce thefts and vandalism, he said.

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Phyllis Reed, director of pupil services at the Anaheim City School District where Franklin is located, said some of the school’s poor ranking for weapons infractions might have to do with reporting. The district went above and beyond in reporting knife incidents, she said.

“Was there a knife? Yes, there were knives,” she said, adding that state law required the schools to make a report “any time there’s a blade that’s a locking blade, or has a blade that’s at least 2 1/2 inches long. Many of our principals reported knives that were under that.”

Still, she said, knives at school are clearly a problem. “We don’t know why our kids are bringing that many knives to school,” Reed said. “I think it reflects what may be going on in some of our neighborhoods. But we certainly are addressing the problem. We’re working with our conflict management program on our campuses and stressing that heavily.”

The Times’ data clearly show that poverty and crime were not necessarily related on Orange County’s campuses. Among high schools, eight of the 10 schools with the highest crime rates have mostly middle-class or affluent students.

An expert in school safety, UC Santa Barbara education professor Michael Furlong, was unsurprised by those statistics. Stereotypes about school crime often prove inaccurate, he said.

Some campuses in inner-city Los Angeles, he said, are virtually indistinguishable from those in Simi Valley and Thousand Oaks, two cities that consistently rank among the nation’s safest.

A strong academic focus may be what helps keep some schools safe.

One of the two schools reporting the fewest crimes last year was Sunny Hills High, known for its rigorous International Baccalaureate program.

Sunny Hills Principal Loring Davies said the concentration on achievement and the presence of a police officer on campus, who can avert trouble before it escalates, helped his school report a mere three crimes.

To help students at the ethnically diverse school break down racial stereotypes and get to know each other, Sunny Hills also halts class one day each fall for an all-student gathering dedicated to team-building and conflict-resolution training.

“I can’t pinpoint any one thing that makes a safe school,” Davies said. “We have great students from a relatively affluent community who come to school very focused on academic achievement.”

Some of the biggest disparities in the data were in reports of battery, in part because of differences between two state laws.

Under the California Safe Schools Act, battery is defined as “the willful and unlawful use of force or violence upon the person of another” and merits suspension--if not expulsion--in most schools.

But the state Education Code says that if a school does not determine which student is the aggressor and which is the victim, the incident may not be reported at all and shrugged off as “mutual combat.”

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This plays a role in explaining why the Santa Ana Unified School District, with a student population of 53,805, reported only 21 instances of battery during the 1997-98 school year while the Anaheim City School District, with fewer than half the students, reported 121 incidents--a rate 15 times greater than Santa Ana’s.

“You have to report battery when there’s a clear victim and a clear aggressor,” said Reed of the Anaheim district. “When your district comes out with the highest battery rate, you begin ask yourself, ‘What are the other people not reporting?’ Or maybe we are highest in that area. I don’t know; it’s a tough call. But we are aware of it, we are addressing it, [and] it’s something we take very seriously.”

Jim Miyashiro, in charge of security on Santa Ana’s school campuses, said, “We do have a very low assault rate on campus, and it has to do with the definition of what constitutes battery.”

Miyashiro, who readily acknowledges that there’s a lot of schoolyard fighting in Santa Ana, said he would not consider it a case of battery if the attacked student fights back. “If it’s something where one guy just whales another guy, and he’s not really fighting back, then that would generate something” in the way of a crime report.

Santa Ana’s battery figures show its schools to be the least violence-prone among all the unified school districts in the county except one, Los Alamitos Unified.

The district, however, was targeted for a state Education Department audit because it initially did not comply with a request for information that would allow the state to verify the crime reports. The state is auditing four additional Orange County school systems that either declined or failed to submit all of their disciplinary data to the state. Those are: the Orange County Department of Education, the Savanna School District, and the unified school districts of Irvine and Laguna Beach.

State auditors could check to see whether a district’s suspensions for drug or alcohol use, for example, were in line with the reported number of drug and alcohol cases.

Jean Scott, who heads the California Safe Schools Assessment program in Sacramento, said three Orange County districts already had been visited, but she declined to reveal the inspectors’ findings. “They’re still works in progress,” she said.

State auditors who visited Santa Ana last year concluded that the district’s reports were 98% accurate, Miyashiro said.

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Some Orange County educators are already putting their crime reports to use. Edison High School in Huntington Beach is a case in point.

Known for scholarship-earning students and winning sports teams, Edison had the highest crime rate for high schools in the county, twice the statewide average.

Assistant Principal Brian Garland said his school’s figures--including 23 batteries and robberies and 67 acts of theft and vandalism--are accurate. But, he added, the battery numbers come in part from a group of students who are prone to fighting.

“Edison is a good school, a safe school,” Garland said. “Ninety-nine percent of the students here are wonderful. We’re used to being No. 1 academically and No. 1 in sports, not No. 1 in [reported crime]. Anyone who sees those numbers and thinks, ‘It must be a den of iniquity there,’ have them stop by and see that this is a good place for kids.”

The school safety data underscored one of Edison’s most easily remedied safety problems, Garland said: the theft of graphing calculators, sneakers, backpacks and books from 30-year-old lockers.

The lockers “can’t be fixed, they’re so out of date,” Garland said. “We tell the kids, ‘Don’t leave anything in the lockers over the weekend; they’re not safe,’ but a lot of them still do.”

School safety data in hand, Edison plans to end its locker woes this summer, spending $50,000 in state grant money to purchase and install newer lockers.

Edison is one of five Huntington Beach Union campuses that landed in the top 10 when Orange County schools are ranked by the overall crime rate per thousand students.

“We very consistently report what happens in our district,” said Huntington Beach Union High School District Supt. Susan Roper. “If we make the assumption that everyone else does that, then our schools are high [in crime]. I have to assume what you see is true.”

Laguna Beach High School had the second-highest crime rate.

Dr. Theresa Daem, superintendent of the Laguna Beach Unified School District, said that Laguna Beach High’s poor ranking rests on the assumption “that everybody was reporting equally, and that’s not a good assumption.

“When this whole [crime reporting] program came about, I was in another district in the Bay Area. It was a sweet little elementary school district, and I told every principal to report every crime. Well, the result was that our little school district had a crime rate that was vastly higher than the crime rate of San Francisco Unified.”

Complete school crime statistics accompany this story on The Times’ Internet site. The address is https://www.timesoc.com/schoolcrime.

* THE NUMBERS

Crime rates at O.C.’s high, middle and worst-off elementary schools. B3,8,9

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Schools With Highest Crime Rates

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Crime Rates at Orange County High and Middle Schools

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Elementary Schools With Above Average Crime Rates

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Schools With Highest Crime Rates

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