A Texas (no surprise there) sophomore decided on a spanking in order to get out of an extra day of in-school suspension. A district policy allows this as a form of punishment as long as the parent gives consent. While consent was given in this case, nobody expected the excessive force or gender of the giver of the punishment.
A local news station reports:
Taylor said she didn’t know a fellow student copied some of her classwork, but the school sent both girls to two days of in-school suspension.
After day one, Taylor didn’t want to return. She went to the vice principal’s office to request a paddling instead. He had Taylor call her mother, who gave her approval.
“I knew school policy was females swatted females, and males swatted males,” Jorgensen said. “If Taylor wanted that, I said that would be fine.”
But she quickly disapproved when she saw the results and learned who actually did the paddling.
“I came unglued,” Jorgensen said.
While a woman was present in the room, a male vice principal swatted Taylor. Springtown ISD policy states “corporal punishment shall be administered only by an employee who is the same sex as the student.”
“It looked almost like it had been burned and blistered, it was so bad,” Jorgensen said.
Taylor also said that she still has welts 48 hours after the incident. Here’s a news video by WFAA:
Also, although district policy specifically says that the spanking must be performed by a member of the same-sex, the superintendent defended the vice-principal’s conduct, saying that the policy need changing due to the higher percentage of male staff members than female. I have one question about that idiotic statement: if there was a female in the room present for the spanking, why couldn’t she have held the paddle in order to comply with district policy?
A man spanking a girl of that age is wrong. Consider sexual development at that age and the cultural sexual connotations of spankings. This is purely speculation, but there is certainly a chance that there was an ulterior motive for this vice-principal. He also stated that he was unaware of the same-sex policy; I vehemently disagree with his pretended ignorance.
Huffington Post reports on corporal punishment as well:
‘He used too much force,” she said, and is furious that rather than taking action against the vice-principal, Springtown ISD Superintendent Mike Kelley asked the school board to scrap the same-sex policy, claiming that he can be difficult to adhere to in some schools, because of the ratio of male to female teachers.
Spanking students has been outlawed by 31 states, but past efforts to ban it in Wyoming, North Carolina, Louisiana and Texas failed. In 2011, however, laws were introduced in both Texas and North Carolina that gave parents the right to exempt their students from corporal punishment.
There has long been controversy over spanking children both at home and in schools, and new research published in The Journal of Pediatrics shows that it can mean risking more than just a sore behind. New findings suggest that eliminating all physical punishment of children would reduce the prevalence of mental disorders, as 2 to 7 percent of cases of mental disorders — including major depression, anxiety disorder and paranoia — are attributable to physical punishment that occurred during childhood, according to researchers at the University of Manitoba.
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I’ve said it before: If a student is acting out in school, his/her parents should be called in and THEY should be paddled.
Insofar as the Vice Principal not being aware of the same-sex rule, he should be told that “ignorance of the law is no excuse,” and HE should be paddled by someone of the opposite sex.
As a teacher for 33 yrs and a teacher of teachers for eight of those years, I know there are many other choices to be made for controlling student behavior in classes. Neither paddling nor suspensions are necessary. Extra homework is one, writing letters to every other student in the class apologizing for interrupting their class is another, doing community service on the student’s own time, etc., etc.