I don’t know if I want to show y’all, this might be on TV, but it’s…
y'know, I would never want to intimidate students, uh...
but there again, if you show them the paddle, then...
they know, “Oh, he does have one.”
— Principal Dustin Evans runs Bland High School in North Texas.
His school district still allows corporal punishment.
While in recent years, he’s relied less on paddling,
he has seen it as an effective practice in the past.
— There are lawmakers in your state, who right now are debating
different ways to regulate corporal punishment. What do you think of that?
— I think it’s going to be hard to find a policy that fits everybody.
You know, just a blanket policy.
I think it should be up to the local school districts.
You’ve got your rural schools, your suburban schools, your urban schools,
and I think everything’s different— the setting’s different.
Some parents want that and some parents don’t want that.
— In the 22 states where in-school corporal punishment is legal in the U.S.,
regulation isn’t uniform and can change from one district to the next.
In Texas, it’s outlawed in major cities like Dallas and Austin,
but remains a popular practice in more than 40% of school districts.
To appease parents and legislators who support a ban,
in 2011, the Texas legislature required all school districts to give parents the ability to opt-out,
a compromise that hasn’t worked out as planned in some communities,
like DeSoto county—just outside of Dallas.
— He grabbed me, and put me on a wall.
He made me face the wall.
— Last year, when Jalijah Smith was 5-years-old,
his kindergarten teacher paddled him with a wooden board
for sticking his tongue out at another teacher.
Jalijah’s mother had signed an opt-out form.
— How did you feel when it was over?
— Bad.
I felt bad.
I got a little scared at nighttime.
— You were scared?
— At nighttime.
Because he paddled me, and I would dream about when he would paddle me.
— I was furious.
I was upset.
Still, to this day, almost a year later,
no explanation has been given to myself or my husband.
— Striking a child?
I don’t believe that it should be a resort for a teacher, at all.
— His school, Meadows Elementary, like all schools in DeSoto County,
distributes opt-out forms at the start of every school year.
There’s no requirement about how schools in the state present the form.
Many parents don’t even know it exists.
93% of parents in DeSoto County who return the form opt-out.
— When you signed that opt-out form, what did you think that it represented?
— Basically, you agree or you disagree.
I purposely—for some reason, this particular time,
my mind said, put asterisk marks there.
I put asterisk marks and circled it,
because that’s how much I disagreed with it.
— When Smith found out that Jalijah had been spanked anyway,
she reached out to local and national politicians
and planned to sue the school and get the teacher fired.
But an attorney at the municipal court discouraged the family from taking legal action.
Even with an opt-out form in place,
Texas educators have fairly strong immunity in corporal punishment cases,
as long as there’s no evidence of excessive force or negligence.
Jalijah didn’t have bruises or signs of harm.
— Because it’s still a part of state law,
there’s not a lot of recourse for parents,
other than if it was not administered in the correct manner.
— David Harris is the superintendent of Jalijah’s school district.
Harris wouldn’t say whether the teacher who paddled Jalijah was disciplined.
The teacher and the Meadows Elementary principal would not respond to repeated requests for comment.
— Is an opt-out form essentially useless,
so long as Texas allows for corporal punishment at a state level?
— It shouldn’t be, but the answer is yes.
And don’t get me wrong, I don’t want to say parents, they don’t have rights,
because they certainly do have rights.
But the bottom line is, if it’s gonna happen,
we want make sure it’s done correctly.
— This year alone, three Texas House representatives have filed new bills
to ban or closely regulate corporal punishment in schools.
Representative Eddie Lucio is one of them.
His bill, HB166, would ban the practice outright.
— There’s no consistency, right?
So, corporal punishment in one school district may be a slap on the hand, right?
In another school district, it may involve a paddle.
It may involve several strikings.
Maybe there’s a disclosure in very fine print about opting out of corporal punishment, and it happens.
What about that parent?
— Wake up, wake up, sleepyhead.
— So a child who has no real say,
who’s at the mercy of their parents and administrators,
we’re going to allow them to be struck physically?
— After Jalijah was paddled,
Smith pulled him out of Meadows Elementary and had him homeschooled for three months.
The district then transferred him to Northside Elementary,
where Jalijah says he feels safe.
But the school is still in DeSoto District,
which means that corporal punishment is still allowed.
The Smiths filled out another opt-out form.
— Is it strange to switch from one school to the next,
where, technically, the same thing could happen again?
— Yes, but… we don’t feel safe.
We just have to educate our kids, and just sign a paper,
and hope that it doesn’t happen again.