MSD Commission calls school crime reports useless

School districts in Florida often under-report and sometimes over-report crimes and other problems on their campus, giving the public no clue about how safe any school is, members of a commission investigating the Parkland tragedy said Wednesday.

Stephen Foster Elementary in Gainesville reported 72 physical attacks of students last school year, while Miami-Dade County reported none for the entire school district. That same year, Pinellas County reported 410 batteries, while Palm Beach County, a district nearly twice as large, reported only 66.

“It defies common sense. It defies logic,” said Bob Gualtieri, chairman of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High Public Safety Commission, which is investigating the massacre that killed 17 people.

“There’s a problem. There’s no question there’s a problem. The question that is still unanswered and glaring is why,” Gualtieri said.

The commission concluded that while some administrators purposely under-report data to make their schools look safer, there also has been inconsistent training and differing views on how serious an incident needs to be before it’s reported to the state.

A fight that involves 20 students is supposed to be counted as one incident, but some districts incorrectly report it 20 times, leading to artificially high numbers, said Julie Collins, who works in the state Department of Education’s Office of Safe Schools.

Collins said the data is “not a good measurement” of how safe a school is.

“High numbers could mean the place is totally law-and-order and writes everything up, or the place is having some control issues,” she said. “Low numbers could mean it’s the safest school in town or they’re sweeping things under the rug.”

The Sun Sentinel expanded its investigation and reported in December that underreporting is a statewide problem, with schools failing to report incidents that included kidnapping, weapons, sexual abuse and even murder.

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