KIDS THESE DAYS:

At last Tuesday’s Newport-Mesa Unified District school board meeting, four members of the Mesa Verde Education Committee told the panel of their concerns about the quality of the education at the schools in Mesa Verde. Adams Elementary School got slammed.

Among his replies, Supt. Jeffrey Hubbard said, “I think Adams is a good school.”

So, which is it? Is Adams a good school or not?

I asked Susan Astarita, the district’s assistant superintendent for elementary education, how Adams got to the point where parents came together to say, “This is not a good school.”

“This is not the first group of parents that has approached us. It’s been ongoing — probably 10 years — where we end up with a small group of parents that comes to us every two or three years concerned about Adams. We always greet them warmly, and we are very interested in working with them. We’ve hosted teas, information nights, coffees in people’s homes and [board member] Dave Brooks has been a great supporter and helped us at the board level.

“So it has been ongoing and it is generally a group of parents who have incoming kindergartners. They live very close to this school, they’d love to come to this school but yet their neighbor may [send their kids to] Huntington Beach or a private school and they don’t understand why.”

But 10 years of parent concerns is a long time — plenty of time for the school to have cleared its name.

Astarita told me that the negative talk is usually neighborhood word of mouth.

“We’ve encouraged these families to please give us a chance. Come and visit the school. [Adams Principal Candy Cloud] is open to tours at any time. I am so proud of the work that they have done over the last five years since we’ve refined our program for English-learners, our new language arts curriculum has come on board and the work we are doing is fabulous.”

Fabulous it may be, but perception is reality.

I pointed out to Astarita, for example, that the decision-makers in the area, the parents, are now using the Internet as their No. 1 source of information for everything. Yet, if they go to the district’s website and pull up the School Accountability Report Card for Adams, it shows many low numbers for the 2005-06 school year.

Looking at the site, it is easy to see why parents could get the wrong impression.

I asked Astarita why the site has not been updated. She said the school is doing an overhaul on the websites, which is one of the first projects for Laura Boss, director of district communications.

“[The websites] are not in good shape, we acknowledge that,” Astarita said. “There has to be a complete overhaul and we are working on it.”

Astarita, Cloud and the entire staff at Adams have given their commitment to meet with parents at any time and address any concern.

But it takes two to dialogue. During the meeting last Tuesday, I gave my name and phone number to the president of the Mesa Verde Education Committee and asked her to call me.

She has not, and that says to me that the committee has to own some part of this breakdown in communication and the ongoing poor perception of the school.

The truth is that Adams is not as bad as the committee claims, nor as good as Hubbard would like us to believe — as usual, the truth is somewhere in the middle.

Whatever the school and the district have been doing to improve the school’s image is not working after 10 years of trying. That means that it’s time to try something new.

But I’m going to err on the side of the district, which has done more than its part to try to patch things up.

District officials have met concerned parents more than halfway and owned part of the poor communication on the website.

So until I hear from the committee, my perception is that they are only interested in lobbing hand grenades and gossiping.

And as you know, perception is reality.

STEVE SMITH is a Costa Mesa resident and a freelance writer. Send story ideas to dailypilot@latimes.com.