Some area schools still spank

By Connie Cartmell, ccartmell@mariettatimes.com
More than 100 nations have banned paddling in schools.

Twenty-nine states in the U.S. have banned paddling. All Ohio Catholic schools and almost 600 public school districts educate children without corporal punishment, according to the Center for Effective Discipline in Columbus.

Legislation passed in 1993 discouraged corporal punishment in schools, and current Ohio law bans it, but allows a local school board to vote to keep it if they go through a number of special procedures.

Today, 13 Ohio counties, including Morgan and Guernsey in southeast Ohio, continue to paddle students.

If a school district does paddle, one requirement is reporting the number of incidents and number of students paddled. Another is involving parents.

“Every parent signs a paper if they don’t want their child paddled,” said Jeff Shaner, president of the Morgan Local School District Board of Education. “The school honors that parent’s wishes.”

Shaner, who has been on the board since 1995, said paddling was a topic of conversation in the district three to five years ago, but the issue hasn’t come before the board in recent years.

“Local feedback is that this is not an issue,” Shaner said. “We’ve gone from hundreds (of paddlings) to 66, the last I heard. Almost all are in the high school and almost none in K-6.”

In the 2006-07 school year, a total of 321 paddling incidents were reported in the 13 Ohio districts which still paddle, carried out on 202 students.

In Morgan Local School District, 36 students were paddled and the total number of paddling incidents reported to the state was 66.

Morgan’s statistics were the highest reported in the state that year.

In East Guernsey Local School District, one student was paddled at school in the 2006-07 school year, according to reports from the Education Management Information System of the Ohio Board of Education, verified through the Center for Effective Discipline.

“I am not opposed to paddling as an option,” Shaner said. “But paddling every day? Absolutely not.”

Paddling is a last resort in the district, he said, and at the bottom of a lengthy list of discipline policies and options, all part of the district’s code of student conduct.

When Shaner was a teacher in the 1980s, he said corporal punishment was often the first discipline option.

“We’re far removed from that today,” he said.

A verbal reprimand, after-school or in-school detentions, Saturday school, assignment to Alternative Education Placement, out-of-school suspension or corporal punishment (swats) are all mentioned as options in the high school’s handbook (which can be viewed online at http://www.mlsd.k12.oh.us'>www.mlsd.k12.oh.us).

“In some instances,” Shaner said, “a student might rather have a ‘swat’ and forget the detention time.”

Former Morgan County teacher Karen Greer of McConnelsville isn’t certain that totally banning paddling from the school district is a good thing.

“I think it needs to be on the books,” she said. “I think there should always be that option—a last resort.”

Early in her teaching career, she did paddle a junior high student once. She had a reputation for being a strict disciplinarian, she said.

“I got physically ill after I did it,” she said. “The student’s mother and I cried on the phone afterward. The parent needs to know what you are doing and why. My principal did most of the paddling.”

Greer remembers that when she was in public school in the 1950s, there was no hesitation to spank in the schools.

“I was a good kid, but one time the person in back of me was pulling my hair and I reached around at the wrong time, the teacher was walking by, and she smacked me in the back with a ruler,” Greer said.

The whack left a large red mark, which she hid from her parents.

“Back then, whatever happened at school happened two times more at home,” Greer said.

Greer, who taught junior high 10 years, has not taught for nine years because of health issues.

“That child today still remembers that I cried about it (the paddling),” she said.