Immediately following the massive student walkout to protest gun violence on March 14, I was stunned to read an article about three students who had been paddled — literally smacked on the backside with a wooden bat — for participating in the protest. All three were enrolled in a public high school in Greenbrier, Arkansas, and according to the brief news account, they had "chosen" this punishment over in-school suspension so that they would not miss class or lose eligibility to participate in team sports.
Can this be legal, I wondered?
Turns out that the answer is yes, at least in the 19 states that explicitly allow a teacher, principal or other school staffer to penalize students with physical force. These states — Alabama, Arkansas, Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Wyoming — say that physical punishment is a tried-and-true technique to maintain order and discipline in the public schools.
However, this does not tell the full story since even though 31 states have ostensibly outlawed corporal punishment, the federal Department of Education allows school authorities to use "physical restraint or seclusion in situations where a child's behavior poses an imminent danger of serious physical harm to self or others."
Donald E. Greydanus, professor of Pediatrics and Human Development at Michigan State University College of Human Medicine, further outlined the potential damage caused by corporal punishment at a congressional briefing. Typical after-effects, he testified, can include depression, low self-esteem, magnified feelings of guilt, drug and alcohol abuse, and anxiety disorders. "The use of corporal punishment in the school environment falsely and perfidiously reinforces physical aggression as an acceptable and effective means of eliminating unwanted behavior in our society," he told federal lawmakers. "Our precious children should not be subjected to hitting, slapping, spanking, punching, kicking, shaking, shoving, choking, use of objects including wooden paddles, belts, sticks, electric shocks, excessive exercise drills, or prevention of stool or urine elimination."
Injuries, of course, can also be physical. These include abrasions, bruises, broken bones, hematomas, hemorrhages, muscle injuries, pain and whiplash — conditions that sometimes require hospitalization.
And it is not only the victimized students who are harmed.
Maggie Moschell grew up in southwestern Ohio and graduated high school in 1974. More than 40 years later she still vividly recalls hearing "the crack of the board" as it hit her classmates. "We'd cringe in sympathy," she says. "I remember a boy who came back into the room grinning bravely as if it didn't matter, but there were tears in his eyes. I thought it was a terrible thing to do, but growing up in the 1960s and '70s, we somehow didn't question it."
Ending corporal punishment
Despite wide-scale support for physical punishment, many parents, student advocates and anti-violence activists have continued to push for the abolition of corporal punishment, especially when it is used to discipline disabled children. They have pointed out that children on the autism spectrum and those who are non-verbal often use behavior to communicate. In addition, instances in which students are punished for behaviors that are linked to their disabilities — a child with Tourette's Syndrome shouting random words, for example — have been widely condemned.
Current Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos has, to date, said nothing about corporal punishment, but her predecessor, John B. King Jr., took a different tack and urged all states to abandon it. "The very acts that are permissible when applied to children in schools under some state laws would be prohibited as criminal assault or battery when applied to adults in the community in these very same states," King wrote in a November 2016 letter to governors and school officers. "School-sponsored corporal punishment is not only ineffective, it is a harmful practice and one that disproportionately impacts students of color and students with disabilities. This practice has no place in the public schools of a modern nation . . ."
Not surprisingly, the ACLU agrees. Lawsuits have been filed in states where students have suffered egregious harm at the hands of their teachers or school security. Several, says attorney Susan Mizner of the ACLU Disability Rights Program, involve the handcuffing of elementary school children. Until recently, she reports, district schools in Covington, Kentucky, used School Resource Officers — employees of the Sheriff's office — to maintain order. In one case, an 8-year-old boy who was diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder was having a rough day and the Resource Officer was called. "The Officer had adult-sized handcuffs with him so he put these around the boy's biceps after the child tried to pull away from him," Mizner says. "He was so traumatized by this he had to leave the school district."
In the second case, a 9-year-old girl was wandering the halls instead of waiting in the cafeteria as instructed. Mizner reports that she was put "in a seclusion room and would not calm down so they called an ambulance to take her to the hospital. When the EMTs arrived, they found her on the ground, in handcuffs, in a pain position." She also now attends a school in a different district.
Although litigation in both cases is ongoing, Mizner is pleased that law enforcement personnel have been removed from Covington's schools — a small, but not insignificant, victory.
"These cases are very representative," Mizner says. "We know that restraint and referrals to law enforcement happen regularly to kids with and without disabilities. This tends to impact the youngest kids the most because they are often unable to articulate what happened and are less likely to fight back."
Improving teacher education
In addition to policy changes, what steps can be taken to banish corporal punishment from the classroom? Mizner says that teachers, especially those assigned to Special Education classrooms, need better training and support. "It's easy to demonize educators," she says, "and while some deserve this, many teachers have not been shown ways to react to a kid who is melting down." Learning the techniques to use when a student's behavior is escalating — such as diverting his or her attention and disrupting whatever is causing the distress — is essential. "There are many empathetic ways to help people disconnect from their emotions and get back on track," she says.
Taking police out of schools would also help curb physical punishment. However, more and more school districts are bringing police officers into the public schools, ACLU staff attorney Sarah Hinger, reports. "We know that in 2013, 24 percent of elementary schools and 42 percent of high schools had police stationed inside. We also know that 51 percent of schools that were majority African American or Latinx that year, had police on campus." Anecdotally, communities of color know that this has not only exacerbated the school-to-prison pipeline but has resulted in numerous Black and Brown students being tasered, pepper sprayed, put in choke holds, and battered with police batons. Unfortunately, Hinger says, an exact number of incidents is hard to come by since record keeping is inconsistent, in some places maintained by the school district and in others maintained by the police department.
For now, educating students and their families about their rights and discussing the negative impact of corporal punishment top the education agenda. "We need a huge cultural shift to help teachers, kids, and their families understand that corporal punishment does more harm than good and is counterproductive," the ACLU's Mizner says.
What's more, since more than 50 countries around the world have banned corporal punishment, advocates say that the US would be wise to follow their example.
Copyright, Truthout.org. Reprinted with permission.
Shares