ALBANY - Schools across New York are failing to report violent incidents and the state Education Department is doing little to fix the problem while denying parents the correct information they could use to transfer their children, state Comptroller Alan Hevesi said last week.

In response, Education Commissioner Richard Mills said his department is taking steps to improve the reporting of violent and disruptive incidents.

Hevesi's office audited the data kept by 15 school districts and compared it to what they reported to the education department.

Ten of the 15 districts didn't report at least a third of violent incidents and five didn't report at least 80 percent, Hevesi's office found.

Among the districts audited, Albany High School reported 144 incidents for the 2003-2004 school year, but auditors found that records at the school showed there were 924 incidents. The school failed to report 106 assaults, including four involving weapons, 55 instances of intimidation or harassment and two sexual offenses. White Plains High School failed to report 93 percent of its violent incidents and both Hudson High School and Ardsley High School omitted 94 percent.

Auditors couldn't go over the reported incidents in four districts because their records were disorganized or didn't exist.

“We found a really stunning failure of the schools to adequately report this information to the state Education Department which can only lead to a conclusion that there is more violence in schools than has been reported,” Hevesi said. “This is very, very serious business and the state Education Department is culpable here.”

Critics have said the education department relies on flawed methods in collecting the data it uses each year to determine which schools are classified as dangerous. Last fall, the department listed just five schools as “persistently dangerous.”

A school is labeled “persistently dangerous” if it meets or exceeds a ratio of violent incidents to enrollment for two consecutive years. Parents can then try to transfer their child to a safer nearby school if space is available. Auditors said that while the education department has modified the incident reporting form, given school districts more detailed instructions and conducted training sessions for school officials, it failed to keep track of who attended the sessions.

Albany school officials, in a written statement, disputed the findings of the comptroller's office, saying auditors did not understand the procedures for reporting violent incidents and voicing numerous complaints about how the data is assembled.

Hevesi's office also found errors in incident data after it was entered in the department's database and determined that controls over data processing at the education department were inadequate.

Mills said his agency will conduct site visits and audit school records, mandate uniform training for school districts on reporting, and put in place new requirements for written documentation and certification of the data.

“The department must be more aggressive on this matter,” he said, adding that it would draft a bill to remove the licenses of superintendents whose districts willfully disobey the law.

He also said the department would start the first of 100 audits of schools around the state to make sure they're complying. School districts are required to report violent and disruptive incidents the state under the 2000 Safe Schools Against Violence in Education Act.