Superintendent Merlyn Johnson said, “Most of the people I’ve met have been on my side.”
As a parent, would you let someone hit your child as a way to teach them a lesson?
Parents use different forms of discipline or other ways of talking to their kids to get them to act better.
But as they get older, they spend less time with their parents and more time with their friends and at school. When this happens, the child might have to follow a different set of rules for discipline.
When physical punishment is involved, this kind of discipline can make a lot of noise.
Last month, a school district in southwestern Missouri brought back spanking as a way to punish students.
The Cassville School District stopped hitting kids in 2001, but they are getting hit again this year.
The policy says that the disciplinary measure can only be used if other corrective actions, like suspensions, have failed, and it can only be used with permission from the superintendent.
An anonymous survey showed that people were worried about how students were acting.
Superintendent Merlyn Johnson was quoted by NPR as saying, “People have actually thanked us for it.” “People on social media would probably be shocked if they heard us say these things, but most people I’ve met have been very supportive.”
But parents aren’t sure what to do. One of them said that some kids need to be hit, but they didn’t sign up for the same discipline program because their child has autism and will fight back when hit.
Experts also say that this kind of punishment doesn’t work.
It changes the child’s behavior and can even make it worse, which is the opposite of what the program is trying to do.
The WHO says that physical punishment can hurt children in many ways, no matter where they live, what their culture is like, or what race they are. The most obvious harm is to the body, but children can also be hurt socially, emotionally, and mentally.
It can also make a school seem like a dangerous place, which can hurt a student’s ability to learn. Mitch Prinstein, the chief science officer for the American Psychological Association, said that this kind of punishment “will not reduce bad behavior” and will only make people “angrier, more hostile, and more likely to get depressed.”
Some people also think that the move was done because of race.
Sarah Font, who is an associate professor of sociology and public policy at Pennsylvania State University, wrote a study with someone else that looked at this issue.
The research showed that corporal punishment is used in poor, rural areas of the South that tend to vote Republican, and that children of color are more likely to be punished this way.
But there is still a lot of pushback against it.
In Missouri, efforts to ban physical punishment haven’t gone anywhere, but Senator Christopher Murphy, a Democrat from Connecticut, wants to ban it in schools that get federal money.
Font told The Guardian that corporal punishment in schools has been going down for a long time. “People are becoming more aware of how ineffective it is as a way to discipline and how it could cause harm.”
So, the district’s decision to bring back this kind of punishment is still being debated.
Watch the video below to find out more about this choice.
