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Missouri school district reinstates corporal punishment for students

CASSVILLE, Mo. — A school district is planning to allow corporal punishment to discipline students, a practice that had been abandoned by the district more than 20 years ago.

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Parents in the Cassville School District were recently notified that the school board voted to approve spanking as a disciplinary option for students, but only as a last resort and only with written consent from parents, the Springfield News-Leader reported.

“My plan, when I came to Cassville, wasn’t to be known as the guy who brought corporal punishment back to Cassville,” district superintendent Merlyn Johnson told the Springfield News-Leader. “I didn’t want that to be my legacy and I still don’t. But it is something that has happened on my watch and I’m OK with it.”

Johnson told KOLR that the decision to bring back corporal punishment was made in response to a survey sent out to parents last year.

That results of that survey, posted to the school board’s website, showed that 37% of parents did not believe the adults in the district are effective at dealing with student behavior, and 41% did not believe students in their child’s school behaved well.

“We did the climate and culture surveys in May, and one of the things that stood out in all three — staff, students and parents — is that we as a district have concerns about a lack of discipline in the schools,” Johnson told the Cassville Democrat.

Each family in the district will be asked to opt in or opt out of the program. Johnson said that many parents have been very receptive to the idea.

“Parents have said, ‘Why can’t you paddle my student?,’ and we’re like, ‘We can’t paddle your student, our policy does not support that,’” Johnson told the Springfield News-Leader. “There had been conversation with parents and there had been requests from parents for us to look into it.”

Johnson told KOLR that corporal punishment will only be done by administrators and in the presence of another certified employee.

“The complaints that we have heard from some of our parents is that they don’t want their students suspended. They want another option,” Johnson told KOLR. “And so, this was just another option that we could use before we get to that point of suspension.”

In the U.S., corporal punishment is legal in 19 states: Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Wyoming, according to the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry. New Mexico was the most recent state to ban the practice in 2011.

In a policy statement on its website, the AACAP said: “The AACAP recommends nonviolent methods of addressing inappropriate behavior in schools, such as behavior management and school-wide positive behavior supports.”