Schools No Place For Spankings
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Did you see the video of a high school basketball coach whipping a player that went viral recently and spawned a mass of outraged viewers? Murrah High School’s Marlon Dorsey admitted to “paddling” his students — even though corporal punishment has been banned in Mississippi’s Jackson Public Schools since 1991 — stating in a letter that he “took it upon [himself] to save these young men.”
Placed on leave with pay, Dorsey has swept corporal punishment back into the news, right after Joe and Katherine Jackson reignited the debate in an interview with Oprah Winfrey. The incident in Mississippi reminds us that some states actually allow corporal punishment in schools, and it’s difficult to determine the bigger shock in that regard. Is it that 20 states still believe it’s OK for school faculty members to spank students? Or is it that some states don’t require parental consent or notification for children to be physically punished at school?
If you think those two things are bad, there’s actually a third choice for what’s worse: Some states have “teacher immunity laws” to protect employees from criminal or civil action. The list includes a who’s who of the Confederacy: Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina and Texas. Dorsey, however, picked the wrong school district to work in. Unlike Jackson, most of Mississippi’s 152 school districts allow corporal punishment, and would have offered him a measure of protection against a lawsuit that three of his players filed against him Nov. 9.
