Teachers Can Spank Kids Black and Blue

Nov. 8 -- Michaela Curtis went straight to the hospital and police when her son came home from school with dark bruises on his behind. But what she learned was the people who hurt her 7-year-old had every right to do so: They were his teachers.

Teachers in Alabama's public schools still have paddles. And whenever a child misbehaves, they can chose to apply that "board of education" to the "seat of learning." It is state law, and some 40,000 Alabama schoolchildren were paddled last school year.

Michael White, who is a lawyer for Alabama's state Board of Education, says paddling is one of the tools to help ensure children get a good education.

"We want a good classroom experience in Alabama," White says. "And if teachers have to resort to forms of discipline, we expect teachers to do that."

In 1995, Alabama lawmakers put the paddle in teachers' hands. The state passed legislation allowing corporal punishment in public schools, and gave local school boards wide discretion as to how and when the discipline should be administered.

Too Hard?

But Curtis, the mother of two children in the Demopolis, Ala., school district, says the state does little to prevent teachers from hitting too hard.

Last year, Curtis says her 7-year-old son came home from the second grade with large, dark bruises on his rear end. Jonathan Curtis was paddled for picking his nose in class. How many licks he received are in dispute. Michaela Curtis, a registered nurse, says her son's bruises were so severe that she immediately took him to a local hospital.

"When I filed the police report at the hospital that night," Curtis says, "I asked the officer, 'What would happen if I did this to my son?' And the police officer said that most likely, my child would have been removed from my custody that evening."

Curtis says what angers her even more is what happened the day before. She says she specifically instructed the school not to lay a finger on her child if he misbehaved, and no one listened.