Escambia County School Board member Jeff Bergosh wrote on his blog that data in the Florida’s School Environmental Safety Incident Reporting (SESIR) System is “complex and there are many factors that go into the reporting of incidents to the state via SESIR. It would not be difficult to imagine local bloggers not comprehending this data and therefore misinterpreting it.”
He adds “Data is complex yet some bloggers are not.” The state spreadsheet is very simple and Escambia County lags behind the rest of the state in reporting its crimes to law enforcement.
However, I do agree that I am not complex.
What the clause that Bergosh uses to define the District’s lack of reporting says is “due to differing interpretations of incident definitions, varying levels of consistency with which schools report incidents, and variation in the amount and level of training provided to school personnel who report SESIR incidents.”
That is exactly my point. Why isn’t Escambia County using the same interpretations, consistency and training as Santa Rosa County and the rest of the state? Instead of disproving my point, Bergosh unintentionally highlights the real issue here—The School District is much more lax in dealing with crime and violence reporting than the rest of the state.
The question Bergosh should be asking is why?
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The “law and order” Bergosh loves the drug dogs and loves drug testing of students, so I have a hard time understanding why he isn’t more upset about the SESIR and demanding more crimes being reported to the law. I thought a conservative like Bergosh would embrace this report and want to protect children from battery and sexual assaults….not explain them as too complex for people to understand.
Instead Bergosh wants to characterize our cover story as demonizing the schools.