Hard Wooden Paddle School Swats
Josephine Heathershaw
Instead, Richard Watson, school board president, referred Cindi and Chris Chancey to Superintendent Frank Holman to discuss the issue. The Chanceys said their daughter, Chadie, 12, was paddled so hard on Aug. 31 that she bled and was bruised.
The parents and the girl asked for the swats with a wooden paddle rather than a three-day in-school suspension for the fight because the girl plays on the junior high school football team. She would have missed the first game if suspended from school, said Cindi Chancey.
Last March an Arkansas mother posted that her 17 year old son was spanked by his principal for walking out of class to protest gun violence. Her son, along with two other students, were given the choice of getting struck with a wooden paddle or two days of in-school-suspension, and they all chose the first option. This sparked outrage on social media, given that most people do not know that paddling still exists in USA schools.
While corporal punishment is banned at schools in 128 countries, 19 USA states and over 4,000 schools still allow school administrators to assault students with wooden paddles, and the practice is so much more widespread than one may think. Each year tens of thousands American students are given the choice of getting struck with a paddle in lieu of another type of punishment such as detention or in-school-suspension, but there are plenty of schools that do not give students an alternative option to a paddling.
Several public high schools even punish students by spreading their paddlings out over several days. Eldorado High School in Eldorado, Texas states in their 2018-2019 handbook that once students are tardy to school for a sixth time they can choose to be spanked for five straight days (two swats per day: 10 total) as an alternative to five days of in-school suspension. Similarly, Jim Ned High School in Tuscola, Texas gives students the option of being beaten with a paddle for three consecutive days as part of their 2018-2019 campus discipline plan.
Over the last few years several high school students have tweeted they have paddled for three consecutive days as part of their punishment, including a student who tweeted he was going to receive 9 swats over a 3 days period in March 2015. In January 2015, a student also received swats for three consecutive days for being late to school, and she tweeted how she cried on the second day of getting them. Another student also tweeted how she cried during her three straights days of being paddled for repeated tardiness in April of 2015.
In 2004, one paddling case of an 18-year old student prompted a federal lawsuit. In Serafin v. School of Excellence in Education, former high school student Jessica Serafin stated her male principal paddled her without her consent after she was caught leaving school to buy breakfast in June 2014. Serafin was 18 at the time, and when her principal informed her she would be paddled for leaving campus Serafin refused to accept her punishment, and was restrained by two school employees while her principal began beating her with a paddle. Sefrain tried to block one of the blows, causing her hand to be smashed by the paddle. According to court papers the paddling left her buttocks bleeding and her hand swollen, and she was treated at an emergency room. However, Serafin lost the case against her school and the Supreme Court declined to hear her appeal a few years later, citing that the school followed their discipline policy.
There have been countless of other cases of students requiring medical attention after getting spanked by their school administrators. Last fall, a fifth-grade student was left so bruised by his paddling that his mother noticed him limping up the stairs when he got home from school. And in July 2013, a student tweeted how her male principal injured her wrist and thumb after she tried to block one of the swats during a paddling the previous year.
Back then, there was no way to be certain of escaping punishment because no one was ever told what they had done. Standing there with my heart pounding, I often felt a sensation of leaving my body and floating up to the ceiling. There was a rumor that the principal, who was universally hated, had an electric chair in his office for "really bad kids." Reminded of that, my first grade sweetheart, who I'll call Ashley, laughed and shook his head. "God, what an awful place!" he marveled. I told him that it wasn't until third grade, when my family moved to a different county and I entered a warm, inviting public school where corporal punishment was prohibited, that I felt I could breathe again. Ashley, in contrast, had stayed at Fitzhugh Lee, and he told me that on one occasion, he was so covered with bruises after a beating that his father, a race car driver, came to the school and threatened to flatten the principal with his own paddle if he ever touched his boy again.
My colleague Rob Waters (now founding editor of MindSite News) and I decided to do a nationwide investigation and were sent across the country in the late 1980s by a Time Inc. magazine to cover the ramifications of school paddling. During our four-month investigation of federal and state data, hospital records, and in-person interviews in eight states, we found that hundreds of thousands of children from 5 to 18 were being whipped, spanked, beaten and paddled on the buttocks for reasons that included talking, "sassing," drawing, getting a bad grade, not turning in homework, dropping a pencil or turning around in their seat. In rare cases reported in newspapers, students were struck with baseball bats, tied to chairs or stung with electric cattle prods.
Jimmy Dunne, a former teacher and anti-paddling activist in Houston, said he doubted many people knew how severe paddlings really were. "I mean, we've got teachers in East Texas who shave down baseball bats and swing with both hands," he told us. Paddlings were sometimes so severe that parents took their children to emergency rooms. (The plaintiff in the Ingraham case ended up there after being held down by school personnel and hit 20 times with a wooden board.) Hospital and medical records we gathered from around the country showed not only welts and bruises but also broken bones, gashes, sprains and concussions.
Another suicidal boy I wrote about was a six-year-old with ADHD in Madison, Tennessee, who tried to hang himself after being paddled more than 16 times for talking, "drawing at the wrong time," and other infractions. Standing on the platform of a 10-foot circular slide on the school playground, he tied a jump-rope to the top rail, knotted the rope around his neck and jumped. "I was real scared then and trying to scream for help," he told me over the phone. "The rope was smooshing all the air out of me. I could see all the kids underneath me, circling and circling like lions in a cage. My friends were trying to push me back up, and it seemed like it took forever for a teacher to get over to me." His parents were convinced he didn't want to die. "It was a cry for help," his mother said tearfully, "so we would finally listen when he talked about school."
Why? It's hard to imagine from an adult perspective, but at 6 I felt being slapped at school had demoted me to the status of a "bad kid," who would now be looked upon with profound disappointment and regret by her loving and largely religious family. My father had put a ladder up to the gutter to clean out some leaves, so I decided I would climb up on the roof and dive off the back side of the house to the concrete two stories below. Fortunately, the ladder was not there when I got home from school. I decided to wait until it was back to put my plan into action, but my mother noticed something was wrong and asked me why I was so quiet and forlorn. She listened while I told her what had happened at school, then hugged me and told me not to worry about it. Immediately, an enormous weight lifted off me and my plan evaporated.
Meanwhile, the abuse of students continues. In 2014, a federal district court refused to hear a lawsuit brought by an 8th grader in Mississippi who fainted after being paddled by a school administrator, falling head first to the floor and breaking his jaw and five of his teeth, according to court papers reviewed by Education Week.
In 2018, a school gave Wylie Greer, 17, of Greenbrier, Arkansas, two swats with a paddle for leaving class to protest a rash of deadly school shootings. Greer told CNN he was given a choice between a suspension and corporal punishment. "I felt like if I stood up and took the punishment in an honorable way it was better than doing what they wanted me to do, which was to shut up and go on with our lives," he said. "The idea that violence should be used against someone who was protesting violence as a means to discipline them is appalling."
Like the vast majority of children nationwide, the nearly 2,000 students at Cassville, in southwestern Missouri, have never had to face the threat of physical force by their school leaders before. The district stopped using the paddle as a form of punishment two decades ago. But the school board voted in June to bring it back.
Two senior girls are disciplined in class in a highly jocular atmosphere. Each girl receives six swats from a heavy-looking paddle. This punishment is informal even by American standards, to the point of appearing chaotic. It is not carried out with the recipient bent over a chair or desk but rather is performed with the teacher holding on to a pocket of the recipient's trousers.
In this clip, two schoolboys are seen receiving three brisk paddle swats each. We seem to be in a locker room, so presumably the teacher doing the spanking is a sports coach. He looks as if he is familiar with performing this task. The paddle appears to be made of Lexan or some similar material. The first student thinks he is getting only one swat and is told he is getting three. The culprits stand up straight, holding on to a shelf. There is a rather raucous atmosphere among one or two other students present, but the swats are real and hard. This is at Richwood Middle School in Monroe, Louisiana. See this Oct 2013 news item.
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