15 states have laws that allow corporal punishment in schools.
It's the states you would most expect, by the way. School should be a place for kids to feel safe, not somewhere they get hit. It's obscene and backwards. I grew up in Florida where they would strike children in school and to this day I get a sinking feeling of despair when I catch a whiff of that elementary school smell. Luckily my kids are safe from that in the northeast where I live now.
>One day, about eight years ago, when Tessa Davis' son was in kindergarten, she got a call from his school outside Little Rock, Ark. She said the school told her he had grabbed a girl's jacket in the cafeteria and twisted it – they thought he was trying to choke her.
>Given his past misbehavior, Davis said, the school gave her two options: He could either be suspended for three days or a school administrator could paddle him. NPR is only identifying her son by his first initial, C, because this story details his behavioral struggles and how he's been disciplined in school.
>Davis said she couldn't afford to miss three days of work to stay home with C.
>"I was kind of at, just like my breaking point," Davis recalled. "I told my husband that he could decide what we would do. And he was like, 'Well, I was paddled, so give him the paddling.' So that's what we chose. And I just remember feeling like instant regret."