Battle to Save Corporal Punishment In New Orleans Catholic School
Posted: June 1, 2011 Filed under: children, Civil Rights, physical abuse, Surreality, U.S. Politics | Tags: Archbishop Gregory Aymond, authoritarianism, conservatives, Monica Applewhite, New Orleans, paddling, red states, Republicans, St. Augustine High School 22 Comments
Do you get the feeling the bad old days are coming back? U.S. economy has returned us to 1930s-style levels of unemployment, evil Republicans like Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell are trying to recreate the poverty of those years by removing the social safety net, and Republicans are working as hard as they can to make sure women have no control over their bodies or their lives.
Now we have students of a Catholic school in New Orleans and their parents demanding Archbishop Gregory Aymond reverse his decision to end corporal punishment, and school alumni aresuing the educational consultant who recommended the policy change!
Can this really be the 21st Century?
From yesterday’s New Orleans Times-Picayune:
The controversy over corporal punishment at St. Augustine High School resurfaced Tuesday when several alumni sued a consultant [read the suit here (pdf)] who advised Archbishop Gregory Aymond that St. Augustine students had been injured by paddling.
The claim isn’t true, the alumni said.
For months Aymond, who as archbishop exerts some control over the Catholic school, has sought to end St. Augustine’s decades-old practice of paddling students. He has said it is not consistent with Catholic values.
But backers of corporal punishment, who include St. Augustine administrators, parents and alumni, say it is part of St. Augustine’s formula for success.
According to the story, the consultant, Monica Applewhite, convinced the Archbishop to ban paddling of students against the decision of the review committee.
In late 2009 Aymond asked Monica Applewhite, described as a educational safety consultant based in Austin, Texas, to look into discipline at St. Augustine.
As Aymond’s representative, Applewhite sat in on St. Augustine’s internal review of its corporal punishment policy. The review committee elected to continue the policy, with modifications.
But the lawsuit says that Applewhite privately advised Aymond that she learned during her inquiry that parents had taken three students to the hospital after paddling, and that others had been paddled “day after day and more than 5 or 6 times a day.”
Archbishop Aymond says he has been contacted by former students and parents of students who were injured by corporal punishment in the school. He made this statement at a news conference today:
“I feel it necessary at this time to share that since the issue of paddling at St. Augustine has become public, I have been contacted both in writing and in person by individuals and parents of individual students who were injured as a result of being paddled at school,” Aymond said in a statement. “Those who have shared this information with me have done so in confidence, but at this juncture, the public should know that my concerns over paddling at St. Augustine go beyond Dr. Applewhite’s report to first-hand accounts.”
I also want to point out that paddling at St. Augustine’s is routinely used to discipline students for such shocking infractions as “tardiness, sloppy uniform dress or other minor rules infractions.”
Frankly, I thought that corporal punishment had been eliminated in the U.S. But I was wrong. According to this report on corporal punishment research, paddling is still common in a number of states.
The US Supreme Court decided in 1977 that spanking or paddling by schools is lawful where it has not been explicitly outlawed by local authorities. It is true that the incidence of CP has declined sharply in recent years, but only 31 states (plus D.C. and Puerto Rico) have actually abolished it, either de facto or de jure. CP is still used in the other 19 states, and it remains a fairly common practice in three of them, all in the South: Alabama, Arkansas and Mississippi.
It is also routine, but only in a minority of (often rural or small-town) schools, in five more southern states: Georgia, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Texas.
The latest states to abolish were Delaware, in 2003, after an eight-year gap in which no abolitions took place at state level; Pennsylvania, in 2005; Ohio, in 2009; and now in 2011 New Mexico (documentation in next update). The number of paddlings had already fallen to a low level in these states.
On the other hand, efforts to ban school CP by legislation have failed in 2003 in Wyoming and repeatedly in Missouri, and also in North Carolina in 2007 and Louisiana in 2009.
The New York Times had a story about corporal punishment in September 2006. This chart was published with the article.
The pattern suggests that corporal punishment is more accepted in southern states and red states. Perhaps there is something to notion that Republicans and conservatives generally tend toward authoritarianism.
In my opinion, paddling is child abuse and should be illegal. Furthermore, I think children have rights just like adults do. I guess if the Supreme Court disagrees with me, our only hope is for sanity in state legislatures. Good luck with that.
Thanks to Dakinikat for alerting me to this story.
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I was horrified when I heard about the law suit today. I can’t believe that it’s illegal to commit battery on an adult but perfectly fine to do it to a child. I had no idea that all states hadn’t outlawed this.
I didn’t know either. I was stunned.
I guess spanking of children by parents would also be outlawed if battery on children were illegal (?)
Even in places where CP is outlawed in schools, it still sometimes happens. It was illegal to hit kids in NYC public schools when I was young, but that didn’t stop my fifth grade teacher from kicking me in the butt once when I didn’t move fast enough for her.
How do you teach children bodily sovreignity if any old person can grab them and beat them up?
How do you teach them that it’s NOT ok to beat up others, when they are beat up themselves? How can you be absolutely positive that the child you are paddling deserves to be paddled?
Yeesh. It should be a foregone conclusion; beating up children is wrong.
But it’s not any old person, it’s just parents and school officials some people think ought to be allowed to administer CP to children.
Another thing that would need to be addressed is children’s incessant beating up of each other.
The fact is that crimes against children are treated much less harshly than crimes against adults. Our culture is not at all child-friendly. We still treat children like property and not unique individuals with human rights.
Bullies are usually children who have been abused at home.
In that case girls should be childhood’s worse bullies. There are girl bullies, but for all the talk of “mean girls” the majority of bullies are still boys.
Actually, both boys and girls engage in bullying behavior. Boys are more likely to be physically aggressive. But girls have been getting more aggressive as our culture has changed.
Managed to escape the worst of the tornados today that has ravaged my section of Western Mass leaving Springfield in a state of disaster.
We were on high alert here in WM for over 7 hours of intense weather that has left a path of devastation but luckily there was more property and structual damage than any loss of life.
It was pretty scary there for awhile. It is rather unusual for this part of the country to have had to endure this type of weather.
We’ve been worried about you. Glad to hear you’re okay and so sorry you had to go through that. I was raised in tornado alley so I know the drill more than well. They are always scary.
Hi Pat,
I was hoping to see you tonight. I was worried about you. So far we’ve had intense thunderstorms but no twisters, thank goodness.
It was very intense. My son in Reading kept calling as we out here in WM watched the progress across the state.
Springfield has been devastated to say the least but they are saying that Monson looks like a replica of Joplin, MO which is unbelievable. And they lingered for over 7 hours which is unusual.
However, Sarah Palin did manage to make her way to MA today. Anyone else see the irony in this?
It’s incredible. They are reporting four deaths now. I fear there will be more by morning.
Tornadoes, storms hit Massachusetts, killing four http://tinyurl.com/3dgvpwm
You were both who I thought of first when I heard of the Tornados – glad to hear you are both ok
As one who was raised in Catholic schools when the nuns felt no compunction about yanking hair, pulling ears, or raising their rulers across our knuckles, this form of abuse should be banned outright.
What is wrong with those parents who insist on keeping this form of corporal punishment as a means to learning? It is not.
Just when you think that we make some form of headway against this abuse along comes a group who prefers to uphold it. Crazy.
I had that in public school in Council Bluffs Iowa but it changed when we moved to a more progressive school district in suburban Omaha, Nebraska.
Another one stunned by this lawsuit.
I can’t believe how stupid filing this lawsuit is. The Church isn’t a democracy and certainly isn’t going to be seen knuckling to pressure from anyone, especially Sadists For Child Abuse. Great publicity there. Also, it’s incredibly easy to prove they don’t know what they’re talking about, and once former students start feeling like they have to come forward to support the doctor, they may also decide to sue the school. If the Alumni Association pushes this far enough, the place just may end up getting shut down.
Getting physical with children isn’t the way to show them respect.
Women need to step up to the church and schools and say NO, not my child. Don’t let them get away with it.
Who Would Jesus Whip?
http://www.ncregister.com/blog/who-would-jesus-whip/
There’s a blog post with some video believed to have been shot at St. Augustine along with a link to a document associated with the lawsuit at http://facebookwatcher.blogspot.com/2011/06/st-augustines-high-school.html