Countywide : Brea-Olinda, Laguna SAT Data Reported

Following a countywide trend, high school seniors in the Brea-Olinda and Laguna Beach Unified school districts who graduated in 1989 scored significantly higher than their 1984 counterparts on the statewide Scholastic Aptitude Test, according to figures released this week by the state Department of Education.

The reports on trends in test performance for college-bound seniors in the two districts were not included in a countywide report, published in Tuesday’s editions of The Times and other media, because the state originally released figures only for the county’s larger school districts, said state Department of Education spokeswoman Susie Lange.

In Brea-Olinda, statistics comparing 1984 graduates to members of the class of 1989 showed that the number of seniors who scored 450 or better in the SAT’s verbal section increased 76%, from 14.1% of seniors to 24.8%. In the math section, 30.5% of the seniors scored 500 or better in 1989, a 55% increase over the 19.7% figure for 1984.

In Laguna Beach, 35.5% of the 1989 seniors scored at least 450 in verbal, a 27% increase over 1984, and 34% of the 1989 seniors scored at least 500 in math, a 39% jump. A verbal score of 450 and a math score of 500 makes most students eligible for admission to the University of California and California State University systems, Lange said.

The state report also showed that 45.2% of the Brea-Olinda class of 1989 met what are known as the “a-f requirements,” or courses required by UC for admission. That represented a 21% rise over the 37.3% of graduates who met the requirements in 1985. In addition, 43.7 of every 100 1989 Brea-Olinda graduates passed advanced placement exams, a 217% rise over the 13.8 of every 100 who passed in 1984.

Similar figures in Laguna Beach showed a 14% drop between 1985 and 1989 in seniors who met the a-f requirements, and 291% rise in the number of advanced placement exams passed per 100 seniors between 1984 and 1989.

The 14% decrease in the a-f requirements category in Laguna Beach and the 76% rise in seniors scoring at least 450 in the SAT verbal section in Brea-Olinda represented the lowest and highest performance rates in those categories in the county. However, state education officials noted that the Laguna Beach figures are for the district’s only high school and that the Brea-Olinda statistics represent results for two high schools and thus cannot be directly compared to districts with greater numbers of students.