Lawmakers in the Florida House said on Wednesday they didn’t know public school officials could still use corporal punishment to discipline students. That practice, which is in use in nearly a third of school districts, could be restricted under a proposal that’s getting bipartisan support this legislative session. Short of banning school officials from paddling […]
That the prohibition in her own school district did not protect the Florida first-grader from being hit is just one example of how corporal punishment persists even in places where the practice is explicitly outlawed.
About a dozen school districts in states where corporal punishment is banned reported using it on students more than 300 times during the 2017-18 school year, according to an analysis by The 74 of the most recent civil rights data from the US Department of Education. And in Louisiana, a state where paddling is permitted except on students with disabilities, data shows that special education students were hit nearly 100 times in 2017-18. Years of data have shown that students of color and those with disabilities are disproportionately subjected to corporal punishment, a practice that goes on despite a substantial body of research showing its harmful effects on youth development.
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Among the states that allow teachers to physically punish their students are the following: Wyoming, Texas, Tennessee, South Carolina, Oklahoma, Missouri, Mississippi, Louisiana, Kentucky, Kansas, Indiana, Idaho, Illinois, Georgia, Florida, Colorado, Arkansas, Arizona and Alabama.
A commonality among many of these states is that corporal punishment is persistent in the South where Black students face discrimination from white educators, the report noted.
The leading state is Mississippi, where teachers are known to implement corporal punishment nearly 28,000 times a year.
“It would be an aggravated battery if you hit an adult with that paddle [and] the fact that she hit a little first-grader makes it even worse,” Attorney Brent Probinsky, who is representing a mother of a girl recently paddled in Florida, said. “It’s against the law to impose corporal punishment on prisoners. It’s against the law to impose corporal punishment on child