The Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) is the administrative arm of the

Missouri State Board of Education Missouri State Board of Education (MSBE) is Missouri's board of education, headquartered in Jefferson City.public education system In public relations and communication science, publics are groups of individual people, and the public (a.k.a. the general public) is the totality of such groupings. This is a different concept to the sociological concept of the ''Öffentlichkei ...

. Through its statewide school-improvement initiatives and its regulatory functions, the department strives to ensure all citizens have access to high-quality public education. In addition to the commissioner of education, the department organization reflects functions under two divisions; Financial and Administrative Services and Learning Services. The department is headquartered in the Jefferson State Office Building in downtown

Jefferson City, Missouri Jefferson City, informally Jeff City, is the capital of Missouri, United States. It had a population of 43,228 at the 2020 census, ranking as the 15th most populous city in the state. It is also the county seat of Cole County and the princip ...

. It was reorganized and established in its present form by the Omnibus State Reorganization Act of 1974.

''St. Louis Post-Dispatch'' database report

On October 14, 2021, the ''

St. Louis Post-Dispatch The ''St. Louis Post-Dispatch'' is a major regional newspaper based in St. Louis, Missouri, serving the St. Louis metropolitan area. It is the largest daily newspaper in the metropolitan area by circulation, surpassing the ''Belleville News-Dem ...

'' reported that a flaw on a DESE website allowed the exposure of the Social Security numbers of over 100,000 DESE administrators, counselors, and teachers. The ''Post-Dispatch'' notified DESE of the security flaw and delayed the publication of its story "to give the department time to take steps to protect teachers’ private information, and to allow the state to ensure no other agencies’ web applications contained similar vulnerabilities". In response, governor

Mike Parson Michael Lynn Parson (born September 17, 1955) is an American politician serving as the 57th governor of Missouri since 2018. A member of the Republican Party, Parson served in the Missouri House of Representatives from 2005 to 2011 and in the ...

announced that the

Missouri State Highway Patrol The Missouri State Highway Patrol (MSHP) is the highway patrol agency for Missouri and has jurisdiction all across the state. It is a division of the Missouri Department of Public Safety. Colonel Eric T. Olson has been serving as the 24th supe ...

digital forensic unit would investigate "all of those involved", vowed to seek criminal prosecution of the "hacker" journalist who reported the story, and said his "administration is standing up against any and all perpetrators who attempt to steal personal information and harm Missourians". Parson claimed the reporter wanted "embarrass the state and sell headlines for their news outlet", calling the reporting a "crime against Missouri teachers" and pledging to "hold accountable all those who aided this individual and the media corporation that employs them". Parson's response was widely condemned by tech experts, who asserted that checking a web page's

source code In computing, source code, or simply code, is any collection of code, with or without comments, written using a human-readable programming language, usually as plain text. The source code of a program is specially designed to facilitate the wo ...

does not qualify as hacking and that prosecution would result in

chilling effects Lumen, formerly Chilling Effects, is an American collaborative archive created by Wendy Seltzer and founded along with several law school clinics and the Electronic Frontier Foundation to protect lawful online activity from legal threats. L ...

that would prevent future security vulnerabilities from being reported. Parson was also criticized by a variety of local and national politicians, including Republican lawmaker

Tony Lovasco Tony Lovasco is a Republican member of the Missouri House of Representatives. He represents the 64th district, which as of 2022 encompasses a portion of northwest St. Charles counties, including a northern part of Wentzville, much of northern ...

and Democratic Senator

Ron Wyden Ronald Lee Wyden (; born May 3, 1949) is an American politician and retired educator serving as the Seniority in the United States Senate, senior United States Senate, United States senator from Oregon, a seat he has held since 1996 United Stat ...

References

External links

Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary EducationOfficial Manual of the State of Missouri
*Publications by or abou
Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education
at Internet Archive. {{authority control

Department Department may refer to: * Departmentalization, division of a larger organization into parts with specific responsibility Government and military *Department (administrative division), a geographical and administrative division within a country, ...

State departments of education of the United States Elementary and Secondary Education, Department of