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MERIDIAN, MISSISSIPPI, February 21, 2004: When Ralph McLaney, assistant principal at Carver Middle School, resigned from his position rather than paddle a student, the debate over corporal punishment took to the forefront again. The article explains, “A decision last month by the Canadian Supreme Court to outlaw the use of the strap by teachers has left the United States and a lone state in Australia as the only parts of the industrialized world to allow corporal punishment in schools, according to anti-paddling activists. While 28 U.S. states have outlawed paddling over the past three decades, the practice remains commonplace across much of the Bible Belt (the Southern USA).” McLaney defends his position, “The idea of a big white guy hitting an 80-pound black girl because she talked back to the teacher did not sit well with me. I decided I did not get my master’s degree in education to spend my time paddling students.” Mississippi state, according to statistics collected by the federal Department of Education, is considered the nations top paddling state. An alarming 10% of students are paddled every year. Children from minority and single-parent families top the list for paddlings. The principal at Carver Middle school, Earnest Ward, supports corporal punishment and he is backed by many teachers and parents in Meridian. On the other side of the debate, “Studies have shown that there is a high correlation between paddling and poverty, and corporal punishment is more common in rural areas than in urban areas. Opponents of paddling argue that corporal punishment perpetuates a cycle of poverty and violence.” When McLaney took the position at Carver school, he did not know that paddling would be a daily occurrence — a dozen students a day. Most students attending the school live in housing projects, 90% are eligible for free or subsidized lunches, and 75% of the children come from broken homes. The article quotes more interesting statistics from the Department of Education, “In 2000, the most recent year for which figures are available from the Department of Education, 342,038 public school students were paddled, down from 1.5 million in 1976. The figures do not include paddlings in private and religious schools.” Nadine Block, an anti-paddling advocate from the Center for Effective discipline says, “Under U.S. law, children are the only class of individuals who can be legally hit. Children have less legal protection than someone who is in jail or in the army. Black students are paddled more than twice as often as other students, proportionate to the overall population.” McLaney, who is now looking for another job says, “In the end, I resigned because they made it very clear they were going to fire me otherwise.”

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