Escambia County School Board member Jeff Bergosh has been an ardent defender of Superintendent Malcolm Thomas and how Tate High officials handled the sexual assault at their school. He disagreed with our reports on the School Environmental Safety Incident Reporting (SESIR).
Last Saturday, April 9, Bergosh wrote on his blog that we were “hurling new allegations our way that are incorrect regarding protocols for SESIR reporting.” He stated that the special board workshop on Thursday, April 14 would prove the paper wrong.
Bergosh has only posted four sentences on his blog since the SESIR presentation and those were written during the meeting:
Julie Collins–office of safe schools gave a detailed, powerpoint presentation on SESIR. The big take-away from the presentation- SESIR does not police the reporting by districts-They are not an enforcement agency. I asked if it is accurate for the public to judge a school or district by the percentage of incidents reported to SESIR compared to other schools or other districts. The answer was not necessarily.
Hardly an indictment from the state DOE of how this paper has covered the SESIR, Tate High, Warrington Middle School or the School District. At least, Bergosh didn’t try to spin Collins’ straightforward presentation into something it was not.
Collins told the board about how the SESIR works. No one asked her or Superintendent Thomas specific questions about the 2009-10 SESIR report or any of our reporting on the issue. Collins would not answer any of my questions after the meeting. If we were to be proven wrong, as Bergosh claimed was the purpose of the workshop, then the Superintendent and the board failed.
The workshop was like sitting through an IRS seminar on income taxes with your accountant, but not asking questions about your tax return or even looking at your return. Then you go home and tell your wife your tax returns are okay.
