'Spare the Kids': SPLC and other advocates push to end
corporal punishment in schools
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Rhonda Sonnenberg | Read the full piece here
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Friend,

After a teacher sent Trey Clayton to the library because he would not
sit in his assigned seat, an assistant principal angrily reprimanded
him and ordered him to come to his office.

There, the administrator "struck Clayton three times on the
buttocks with a paddle" with "excessive and great
force," according to a lawsuit Clayton and his mother
filed. Following the incident, Clayton - an eighth grader
in Tate County, Mississippi, at the time - fainted outside the
administrator's office and fell onto a concrete floor face
first.

When he regained consciousness, "he was bleeding, five of his
teeth were shattered, and, it was later determined, his jaw was
broken," according to a lawsuit filed after the March 2011
incident. The paddling left bruising and welts on the boy's
buttocks for days.

Clayton, whose jaw was wired shut, missed classes and tests, which the
school refused to let him make up. He failed eighth grade, transferred
to another school, and eventually dropped out.

While his mother had given the school permission to paddle him when it
came down to a choice between corporal punishment or suspension, most
parents would never imagine that their child would be brutalized and
put in danger of this kind of physical harm for simply failing to sit
in a chair.

Yet, three years later, the federal 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals
ruled against Clayton, citing the 1977 U.S. Supreme Court decision
Ingraham v. Wright.
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That ruling rejected the argument that corporal punishment against
school children violated the Constitution's Eighth Amendment
prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment and the 14th
Amendment's guarantee of due process.

In the wake of Ingraham v. Wright, approximately 70,000

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K-12 public school students receive corporal punishment annually
across the 19 states where the punishment is still legal, according to
records from the U.S. Department of Education's Civil Rights
Data Collection for the 2017-18 school year. Southern states are home
to the bulk of these instances.

READ MORE
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