After Complaint, School Relaxes Rule on Opposite-Sex Student Spankings
After complaints, including from a parent who said her daughter suffered “welts, blisters and bruises” from a male administrator’s paddle, a north Texas school board relaxed its rules on corporal punishment.
Before the complaints, the Springtown Independent School District policy only allowed male administrators to paddle male students and female administrators to paddle female students.
But the local school board voted Monday to change the policy to allow administrators to paddle students of the opposite sex, CBS DFW reports. The district noted that some schools only had all-female administrations or all-male administrations.
However, the new rules may be more restrictive. Parents must now approve of the use of corporal punishment before it can be administered; the form of punishment is limited to once a semester; and if the administrator is of the opposite sex, a same-sex adult must also be present.
CBS News quotes Deborah Sendek, program director of the Center for Effective Discipline, as being disturbed by the opposite-sex paddling rule.
“Instead of remedying the situation, what they did was backtrack,” Sendek tells the network. She says 19 states allow corporal punishment in schools.
See video from CBS DFW:
