Quote:
Groups target corporal punishment in schools
The 3-year-old came home in tears from his public pre-kindergarten program, unable to adequately describe what had happened to him or how he had sustained bruises that stretched around his hips to his stomach.
His mother figured out he had been paddled at the program for taking off his shoes during class and playing with an air conditioner. When she went to school officials about the matter, she found that the paddling was allowed under school policy. Ultimately, she wound up withdrawing her son from the rural Texas school.
The boy's case was profiled in a report issued Wednesday by Human Rights Watch and the American Civil Liberties Union. He was among hundreds of thousands of children receiving corporal punishment in school, the groups said, a topic debated as hotly as corporal punishment at home. Last school year, more than 200,000 children were spanked or paddled at school, according to the organizations' joint report.
"Every public school needs effective methods of discipline, but beating kids teaches violence, and it doesn't stop bad behavior," wrote Alice Farmer, the author of the report. "Corporal punishment discourages learning, fails to deter future misbehavior and at times even provokes it."
Corporal punishment in schools remains legal in 21 U.S. states and is used frequently in 13: Missouri, Kentucky, Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee and Florida, according to data received from the Office for Civil Rights at the U.S. Department of Education and cited in the report.
The highest percentage of students receiving corporal punishment was in Mississippi, with 7.5 percent of students. The highest number was in Texas, with 48,197 students.
I guess I didn't realize it since I'm in the Northeast and those that are at least listed as using it frequently are all in the south. I'd move rather than sending Hannah to a school that used corporal punishment.
Nexa