00:00A Missouri school district is bringing back an old-school form of punishment, paddling.
00:05Parents have to be okay with it and give the school their explicit written permission.
00:11What?
00:13Oh my, that sounds fake.
00:15Music
00:28One of the suggestions that came out was concerns about student discipline,
00:32and so we reacted by implementing several different strategies, corporal punishment being one of them.
00:38I thought that went out in the 19th century.
00:40I'm a teacher, and there's no reason for it.
00:43I know adults today, 40, 50 years old, who grew up in schools that had corporal punishment.
00:49Their teachers would paddle them. It's a real paddle power trip, and they hate school.
00:53It's unacceptable. If anybody tried to touch my kid, they're going to be in big trouble.
01:00Music
01:14I'm an assistant principal at a special needs school, so on that level, I'm also very shocked and horrified to hear about this.
01:20If we use violence to discipline our kids, they would understand that violence is a good way of dealing with things,
01:28and that's not the right way.
01:30Nobody's kid should be hit by nothing.
01:32Any person who signed for the wooden paddles, they need to think about their life.
01:36I feel like there's other ways for students to learn, kids to learn better behavior without putting your hands on them,
01:43because then they're just going to exhibit that behavior down the road.
01:46There's other ways to teach. That's my opinion.
01:48I mean, I never got hit as a kid. I turned out all right.
01:52I know some people got hit as a kid. They think they turned out all right.
01:57Music
02:06I mean, even if there's a witness there, who knows what could happen behind closed doors.
02:11My grandma actually grew up very Catholic and was in a parochial school,
02:17and she would be hit with rulers on her fingers.
02:21If she tried to write with her left hand.
02:23When I was young, she used to hit me with wooden spoons on my hands if I tried to eat food before it was time for dinner.
02:29I didn't understand why, and I feel like that would be the reaction of a lot of kids in school.
02:35They would just be scared of school, which is wrong. A kid should not be scared of going to school.
02:40Music
02:49Surely there are better ways to deal with a perceived misbehavior than hitting kids.
02:54Don't hit kids, I feel like. It's that simple.
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