In a country where violence seems to have become a way of life, spanking is making a comeback this school year in the classrooms of one small town in southwestern Missouri. According to a parent who attended the meeting, Administrators in Cassville, about 50 miles west of Branson, notified parents this June of the new policy at an open meeting and handed out consent forms to sign if they wished their children to be subjected to an as yet undefined form of corporal punishment.
According to reports, parents were looking for an alternative to having their children suspended as punishment. Merlyn Johnson, the Cassville R-IV School Superintendent, was asked by parents, “Why can’t you paddle my student?” to which he responded that the school policy does not support such a measure. “There had been conversations with parents and there had been requests from parents for us to look into it,” he said.
Dylan Burns, 28, a local farmer who favors the option of corporal punishment, was happy with the new policy and stated, “At the end of the day, this gives the school one more tool to use to discipline a child, without sending them home on suspension where they’d just play video games” .
Corporal punishment was a widely accepted means of maintaining discipline in U.S. schools during the 19th and early 20th century, but the practice has faded in recent decades.
The issue of spanking in schools went all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court when in 1977 it ruled that corporal punishment in schools was constitutional, giving states the right to decide on their own. Since then, many states have prohibited the practice. But 19 U.S. states still allow it, most of them in the South, according to the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. Richard Wexler, executive director of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform, said he was surprised to hear about Cassville’s decision.
Wexler said, “The trend in America has been going the other way – places are dropping it altogether, this is the first one I’ve heard of anyone adopting it.” The Cassville school district, which serves 1,900 students, formally adopted the policy in June, according to its website. It says corporal punishment is an option “only when all other alternative means of discipline have failed” and needs to be administered without any “chance of bodily injury or harm.”
The website does not specify the preferred form that the corporal punishment will take, only saying that “striking a student on the head or face is not permitted.”
Meanwhile child psychology experts like Wexler believe that, “It’s absolutely a terrible practice. There is no need for a teacher or an administrator to ever physical strike or assault a child. It doesn’t punish, it traumatizes.”
