I graduated from Chattooga High School in 1980. It was a good school and to this day several of my closest friends are my former classmates.
That’s why the story I read this week had me shaking my head.
It seems the new principal, an ex-military, by-the-book type engineered one of the lamer stunts I’ve seen in recent years.
The principal, with the support of his superintendent, personally lopped four pages out of the schools yearbook because of pictures he found offensive.
So what were the students doing in those controversial photos? Drinking brown liquor? Bagging dope? Robbing a Kangaroo?
Hardly.
Mostly they were just acting like doofus teenage boys — playing basketball, mugging for the camera.
Maybe it was the fact that many of the boys were shirtless in the pictures that drove the powers-that-be into a scissors-slashing frenzy, but I’ve got news for them. That’s what boys do when they play ball.
Were they really good pictures?
Not really.
Were they artsy and classy?
Not so much.
Were they enough to justify an overly sensitive bureaucrat taking a blade to a $50 yearbook that was already paid for?
Evidently.
The publication’s contents had been OK’d by the yearbook adviser, since retired, who had been overseeing the yearbook for the better part of three decades.
He was OK with the photos and is angry that the book he and his students worked long and hard on was defaced by the current group of educational apparatchiks running the gulag school system.
(Note: For the record, the yearbook adviser is a former teacher and an old friend of mine. I have not talked to him about this story.)
This story reminds me of a few of my own scrapes in the halls of ol’ CHS.
We had a librarian who would take a pair of scissors to the annual Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue. She chopped out the offending bodies of all the young ladies who dared to bare on the creamy white pages of America’s most popular sports weekly.
The weird thing is she wouldn’t just remove the entire pages or just pull the issue entirely, she would painstakingly cut out the offending photos, leaving us to grandly imagine what tawdry images they must have been.
This is the same librarian who later accused me of running a bookie service out of the library. I got sent to the office on that one, but assistant principal Fred Toney — yes, that Fred Toney, the former Southeast basketball coach and Phoenix High principal — laughed off the accusation.
Coach Toney wasn’t so jovial my senior year when I violated a rule that apparently the bosses took a lot more seriously than I realized.
Only a few weeks from graduation — after an embarrassingly incident-free four years of education — I was caught by “Coach” in the hallways ... AFTER THE BELL!!!
Apparently this was considered an act of anarchy by the higher-ups. Later, in the office, I was told to assume the position.
Now don’t get me wrong. I really liked and respected Fred Toney but something about that situation didn’t sit right.
OK, I was in the hall AFTER THE BELL!!!!! by about five minutes and for this — at age 17 — I was supposed to let a grown man whack me in the posterior with a wooden board.
Nope.
Not gonna happen.
After I declined to bend and grin, I was told that I would submit to the punishment or I would be going home on suspension.
“OK, I’ll go home.”
Coach Toney was not happy and loudly made it clear to me how unhappy he was. I still declined to be paddled.
That’s when the coach did a very smart thing. He sat me down and gave me a speech — emphasizing how personally disappointed he was in my behavior. It was brutal.
That speech was a heck of a lot worse punishment than a paddling would have been, and I left the office a chastened young man. (I also had to pick up trash after school for the next three days.)
It’s amazing the results that reason and respect — two-way respect — can have on a young person.
Better even than a pair of scissors.
Jimmy Espy is executive editor of North Georgia Newspaper Group. Also, you can visit him at Espysoutpost.blogspot.com
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1 comment:
The only group of people in the U.S. still legally subjected to Physical/Corporal Punishment in the 21st Century are children in schools in 20 states. It is ILLEGAL for school employees to hit children with WOODEN PADDLES to punish in schools in 30 states.
The TRUTH is that school children are treated differently in our great nation based on where they live. A middle school student in Texas DIED by having his chest crushed when his teacher sat on him to restrain him, a Texas high school student suffered deep bruising and welts to his lower back, buttocks and back of his legs when he received 21 "licks" with a wooden canoe paddle, which broke during the beating and had to be taped to continue the beating, a 9-year old Georgia 3rd grader suffered deep bruising injuries when he was paddled with a WOODEN PADDLE 3 TIMES IN ONE DAY (Decatur Co., GA affirmed Corporal Punishment Policy 9/17/09 for school children) and a Publicly Funded Charter School in Memphis, Tennessee physically punishes middle/high school boys and GIRLS weekly during a ceremony called "Chapel" by hitting them with wooden paddles and/or whipping their hands with leather straps IN FRONT OF ALL THE OTHER STUDENTS AS A DETERRENT to publicly induce shame, humiliation and fear! The school employees in the above actions have LEGAL IMMUNITY and are STILL paid by our tax-dollars to be ENTRUSTED with the care and education of our children!
A recent news headline reads, “Nearly 60,000 spankings in Miss. schools last year." "Ouch! For the second time in a month, a school district in Leflore County has been hit with a $500,000 (each) lawsuit from a student alleging injuries from a paddling. It was reported that a state legal adviser, who told Bristol, Tennessee Director of Schools Gary Lilly that while school principals who paddled students were legally protected from allegations of assault, they were not immune from accusations of inappropriate or improper touching.
School boards are asking for trouble to sanction a practice that is intended to inflict pain.
Make no mistake: beating schoolchildren on their pelvic area with a wooden board causes more problems than it corrects -- if it corrects any at all. Teacher-training programs do not include instruction in the "correct method" for hitting students. Zero tolerance for weapons and violence is the standard that should apply to everyone in educational settings. Teachers included
What corporal punishment does accomplish is to degrade the teaching profession, drive good people away, and make the teaching field a safe haven for the dangerously unfit. Its net effect on schools is a negative one. The more that schools indulge in paddling, the higher the dropout rate, along with all the social ills that follow, e.g., gang activity, addiction, mental health problems, unemployment, etc.
The time is long over due for our lawmakers and education policy makers to apply the zero-tolerance rule universally. When paddlers complain, as some inevitably will, they should be advised to look beyond their classroom walls and see how schoolchildren are managed violence free throughout the civilized world. They should look and learn from the 30 states where corporal punishment in schools is forbidden by law. If they can't learn, they can't teach.
Over 50 National Children's Health and Education Organizations have issued position statements to OPPOSE SCHOOL Corporal Punishment including the American Medical Association, American Academy of Family Physicians, American Academy of Pediatrics, American Bar Association, the National PTA (Parent Teacher Association), National Education Association, Prevent Child Abuse America and the NAACP, among others.
U.S. Congress is currently holding hearings on Abusive and DEADLY practices in SCHOOLS and MUST ABOLISH Physical/Corporal Punishment Nationwide of ALL Children in ALL Schools, The Cost is $0.
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