A Texas high school student opted to take a spanking rather than serve another day of in-school suspension, but she was left bruised and blistered after she was spanked by her male vice principal, who violated the school's policy on corporal punishment, reports WFAA.
Taylor Santos, a high-achieving sophomore at Springtown High School, said she didn't know that a classmate had copied her homework, but the school assigned both students to two days of in-school suspension. Taylor volunteered to take a paddling instead, to avoid missing any classes. Texas is one of the 19 states that still allows spanking in school, but it requires that parents give permission, which Santos' mother, Anna Jorgensen agreed to.
But what they didn't realize was that it would be the school's male vice principal who would administer the spanking -- violating the school's rule that the teacher giving the paddling must be the same sex as the student.
"I knew school policy was females swatted females, and males swatted males. If Taylor wanted that, I said that would be fine," Jorgenson told WFAA, adding that she was horrified when she saw the results of the spanking and learned of who did the swatting.
"It looked almost like it had been burned and blistered, it was so bad," Jorgensen said of her daughter's behind.
Jorgensen said she called the vice principal to complain, but he told her that it was perfectly normal for her daughter's bottom to look like that after the spanking and he wasn't aware of the school same-sex swatting policy.
'He used too much force," she said, and is furious that rather than taking action against the vice-principal, Springtown ISD Superintendent Mike Kelley asked the school board to scrap the same-sex policy, claiming that he can be difficult to adhere to in some schools, because of the ratio of male to female teachers.
Spanking students has been outlawed by 31 states, but past efforts to ban it in Wyoming, North Carolina, Louisiana and Texas failed. In 2011, however, laws were introduced in both Texas and North Carolina that gave parents the right to exempt their students from corporal punishment.
There has long been controversy over spanking children both at home and in schools, and new research published in The Journal of Pediatrics shows that it can mean risking more than just a sore behind. New findings suggest that eliminating all physical punishment of children would reduce the prevalence of mental disorders, as 2 to 7 percent of cases of mental disorders — including major depression, anxiety disorder and paranoia — are attributable to physical punishment that occurred during childhood, according to researchers at the University of Manitoba.
