By Karen Gutierrez
Enquirer staff writer

Devin Fitzwater, 5, of Burlington checks out a school bus at a pre-school and kindergarten screening for Boone County Schools. He will attend kindergarten at Burlington Elementary this year.. (Patrick Reddy /The Enquirer)

All sorts of data is available on your child's school: Test performance, drop-out rates, average teacher salaries, disciplinary actions. The trick is knowing where to look.

Here's a list of the various reports on public schools, how you can find them and what they'll tell you.

Ohio Local Report Card

How: www.ode.state.oh.us/reportcard

What: The Ohio Department of Education's Web site allows parents to find information about district, individual school and charter school Local Report Card ratings. Information includes how children have performed on state proficiency tests, attendance and graduation rates, and compares them with performance of children in similar districts and statewide. Financial information and demographics are included. The 2003-04 Local Report Cards will be online Aug. 24.

Also on the Web site: A list of similar districts, as well as the characteristics that go into the calculation to create the list; Ohio school district ratings that enable parents to pull up a list of all districts in each category: Excellent, Effective, Continuous Improvement, Academic Watch and Academic Emergency; key terms and definitions in Ohio's accountability plan, including state indicators, a performance index and Adequate Yearly Progress.

Kentucky School Report Card

How: Mailed to parents every January, but you can also view them for any school at http://app2.kde.state.ky.us/report_card/

What: Shows how your child's school is progressing on the annual tests known as the Commonwealth Accountability Testing System, or CATS, and how it compares to the state and nation on a separate, nationally standardized test.

Other information in the report card: school's attendance rate, number of incidents of aggravated assault, drug abuse and weapons, spending per student, number of parents who voted in the last election for site-based council.

Kentucky Performance Reports

How: View these for any school at http://app2.kde.state.ky.us/secure_cats_reports_03/

What: Very detailed test-score information. School results broken down by grade level, by subject tested, and by the students' race, gender, poverty level and disability status.

Kentucky School and District Profiles

How: View these at http://www.dpmr.kde.state.ky.us/district%20profile/mainpage.cfm

What: Shows trends in a district or a school's enrollment and per-pupil spending. Also lists number of suspensions/expulsions, average teacher salary and pupil-teacher ratio, but be careful with this last category. The ratio does not indicate class size. It is calculated by dividing students by the number of certified personnel, whether or not they are in a classroom.

No Child Left Behind data

How: Go to http://schoolresults.org

What: Run by Standard & Poor's, the credit-rating and stock-analysis company, this site allows you to instantly compare schools and districts on whether they are making "adequate yearly progress" under the No Child Left Behind Act. It is important to carefully examine test results at each grade level. A school and its entire district can be judged as failing to make adequate yearly progress if as few as 11 students at the school are disabled, economically disadvantaged or members of an ethnic minority and do not meet a certain goal on reading or math tests.

Comprehensive school-to-school comparisons

How: Go to http://ses.standardandpoors.com/

What: Ohio and Kentucky data will be on this site by the end of the year. Standard and Poor's, the national credit-rating and stock-analysis company, has a contract with the federal government and funding from private foundations to collect dozens of statistics on public schools and allow users to compare up to five schools or districts at a time.

Neighborhood statistics, broken down by district

How: Go to http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/sdds/c2000d.asp

What: This site, operated by the National Center for Education Statistics, gives you a demographic profile of the people living within your school district, based on 2000 Census figures. You can see median household incomes, percentage of renters versus homeowners, average rents, even the percentage of adults with master's degrees or doctorates.

Cindy Kranz contributed to this story. E-mail kgutierrez@enquirer.com