KIDS THESE DAYS:

Here’s a pop quiz: According to the California Dropout Research Project conducted by the UC Santa Barbara Gervitz School of Graduate Education, which high school in the Newport-Mesa Unified School District has the highest percentage of dropouts as of October, 2007?

Here are your choices:

1. Monte Vista High School (alternative school)

2. Corona del Mar High School

3. Estancia High School

4. Back Bay High School (alternative school)

5. Newport Harbor High School

6. Costa Mesa High School

7. Orange Coast Middle College High School (alternative school)

Not only have I given you the choices, I will also give you a big hint: It’s not the school you think it is.

Ready? The answer is Newport Harbor High School, with 2% of its students dropping out.

I have to admit to having some fun with that answer. The truth is that Newport Harbor is tied for the title with Costa Mesa High.

Question No. 2: Which of the seven high schools listed above had the smallest percentage of dropouts according to the same study:

Another hint: It’s not the school you think it is.

The honor of having the smallest percentage of dropouts belongs to Orange Coast Middle College High School, which had no dropouts in the reporting period. You can read the results for all 2,462 California High Schools by visiting www.lmri.ucsb.edu/dropouts/sb7table.php.

Two percent for Newport Harbor and Costa Mesa High Schools isn’t bad when you consider that the statewide average is 3.5%.

But you will not find this important information on the school district’s website.

Our daughter, a senior in a high school in another district, is busy doing the college application and tour routine.

About a month ago, one of the orientations featured an administrator whom I have no doubt was making the school’s president wish he had asked her to take the day off. This administrator went into far too much detail about campus crime, even advising the prospective students not to drive a nice car “like a Mercedes” and park it on campus.

This is a very good school, and my wife and I had not even considered campus safety an issue until she brought it up.

Then the administrator educated us on something called a “Clery Report,” which has to be made public by most college campuses in the nation.

According to the website securityoncampus.org, “The Jeanne Clery Disclosure of Campus Security Policy and Campus Crime Statistics Act is the landmark federal law, originally known as the Campus Security Act, that requires colleges and universities across the United States to disclose information about crime on and around their campuses.

“Because the law is tied to participation in federal student financial aid programs it applies to most institutions of higher education both public and private. It is enforced by the U.S. Department of Education.

“The ‘Clery Act’ is named in memory of 19-year-old Lehigh University freshman Jeanne Ann Clery, who was raped and murdered while asleep in her residence hall room on April 5, 1986.

“Jeanne’s parents, Connie and Howard, discovered that students hadn’t been told about 38 violent crimes on the Lehigh campus in the three years before her murder. They joined with other campus crime victims and persuaded Congress to enact this law, which was originally known as the ‘Crime Awareness and Campus Security Act of 1990.’ ”

Any educational institution receiving taxpayer funds should be responsible for reporting the full spectrum of activity. Locally, a prospective parent can go to Newport-Mesa’s school websites and find test scores, class sizes, and suspensions and expulsions for each school through the School Accountability Report Cards. You can even look up teacher and administrator salaries. To find this information, go to www.nmusd.us/depts/sarc/ and click on the school of your choice.

The information on the report cards is good, but there could be more. Parents should be able to review dropout rates and they should know the percentages of suspensions and expulsions are due to drugs, weapons or fights, even if the district is now bound by law to do so.

Call it our version of a Clery Report.

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