Another "episode" in the ongoing story...
The Soap Maven
I hope it is okay to post this here. This little school is in our Parish
(what you all know as counties...here in Louisiana we tend to NEVER change)
and I went to school with this principal and it is just a big old hairy
mess...another one. I never ever regret what I miss from not being a part
of the school system.
Friday, May 04, 2001
Zwolle paddling case makes New York Times -from the Sabine News
From The New York Times: ZWOLLE, La. — Laid out on the kitchen table, the
snapshots of 10- year-old Megan Cahanin make a grim collage. They are not of
her sweet face, but of her bare behind. There are 12 in all, taken, her
mother says, day by day as the doughnut- shaped bruises on each cheek faded
from a mottled purple to a dirty gray.
By JODI WILGOREN
ZWOLLE, La. — Laid out on the kitchen table, the snapshots of 10- year-old
Megan Cahanin make a grim collage. They are not of her sweet face, but of
her bare behind. There are 12 in all, taken, her mother says, day by day as
the doughnut- shaped bruises on each cheek faded from a mottled purple to a
dirty gray.
Megan's father, Robert Cahanin, recalls that when he first saw the bruises,
hours after she was paddled by her school principal for elbowing a friend in
the cafeteria, he collapsed on the floor, crying. Then he picked up the
phone and called the police, the school board, the governor, his lawyer.
"It hurt me more than it hurt Megan," Mr. Cahanin said in a twist on the old
parental prespanking saw. "You don't hit on my baby."
Megan, a fourth grader whose name appears more often on the honor roll than
on a referral slip to the principal's office, is one of millions of public
school students still subject to corporal punishment, and in March her
family joined a small but apparently growing number who are suing to stop
it. Megan's classmate DeWayne Ebarb, a hyperactive child who has been
paddled regularly throughout his time at Zwolle Elementary — on 17 occasions
in 8 weeks last fall alone — filed a second suit in late April, leaving this
close- knit logging town of 2,000 pondering a practice as old as time.
Though it gets little attention, corporal punishment in schools remains
legal in 23 states, and the United States Education Department's most recent
data show that 365,000 children were paddled in the 1997-98 school year,
most in a swath of Southern states that could be called the Belt Belt.
Yet recent debate over corporal punishment focuses largely on parents, with
even many pro-spanking psychologists and pediatricians loath to support the
principal's paddle. At the same time, though, some school districts and
states say they must increasingly rely on physical discipline as the public
pushes for a crackdown on student misbehavior.
And legislation pending in Congress as part of President Bush's education
package could expand the practice by giving teachers and principals broad
protection from liability for disciplinary actions.
"Almost every democracy in the world has bans on corporal punishment — we're
going in the opposite direction," said Robert Fathman of Dublin, Ohio,
president of the National Coalition to Abolish Corporal Punishment in
Schools. "You can't whack a prisoner, but you can whack a kindergarten
child."
But in many communities like Zwolle (pronounced zeh-WAH-lee), a hamlet about
80 miles south of Shreveport best known for its annual tamale festival,
parents and educators base their support for corporal punishment on two
powerful sources: the Bible, and their own experience.
"That's the way that I grew up, that's the way it's always been in this
society here," said Dan Leslie, superintendent in Sabine Parish, whose 12
schools include Zwolle Elementary. "You act ugly, you do something bad, you
get a whipping."
Of the 27 states that have banned corporal punishment in school, the first
was New Jersey, in 1867. Massachusetts came next, a century later, in 1971.
When Mr. Fathman started his crusade in 1984, after his own daughter landed
on the painful end of a paddle, five states had adopted bans. The 27th, West
Virginia, acted in 1994, following states that also include New York and
Connecticut.
The number of paddlings around the country, the Education Department figures
show, dropped from 1.4 million in the 1979-80 school year to 613,000 in
1989-90 to 470,000 in 1993-94. In many states that allow corporal
punishment, individual districts ban it, and in most schools that allow it
parents can sign a form exempting their children. Black students are 2.5
times as likely to be struck as white students, a reflection of what
researchers have long found to be more frequent and harsher discipline for
members of minorities.
Court challenges have been largely unsuccessful, given a 1977 decision by
the Supreme Court rejecting the notion that paddling is cruel and unusual
punishment. A decade later, a federal appeals court ruled that a New Mexico
girl held upside down and beaten had been denied due process, signaling that
school officials could be held liable for severe beatings. But similar
findings have been rare.
"The vast preponderance of the lawsuits challenging the use of corporal
punishment in individual instances are unsuccessful," said Charles Vergon, a
professor at Youngstown State University in Ohio who has studied the issue
for 15 years.
Families tend to win such cases, Professor Vergon said, only when educators
have "abused in a fairly significant way the public's trust."
The federal liability-protection legislation mimicks statutes in nine states
where paddling is popular, including Louisiana. Scott McLellan, a White
House spokesman, said the measure would head off frivolous lawsuits against
educators and cited a survey showing that 31 percent of high school
principals were involved in litigation last year, up from 9 percent a decade
earlier.
Many education and medical groups oppose corporal punishment, saying it
aggravates aggression and can cause depression.
But Robert Surgenor, a detective in Berea, Ohio, who wrote a recent book on
corporal punishment, said "pain is probably the most effective form of
discipline." Over 14 years, Detective Surgenor said, he investigated more
than 150 cases of children who had assaulted their parents and found that
fewer than 2 percent had been subjected to corporal punishment, a much
smaller proportion than in the community as a whole.
Emily Williams, a kindergarten teacher in rural Mississippi, said that when
she arrived from Williams College last year, she was horrified to hear
teachers striking students in the hallways, the classroom and the cafeteria.
But by March, frustrated by her own inability to control her class, she had
picked up the paddle herself.
"It's so easy to say that's crazy or that's brutal or unnecessary or savage,
but it's part of the whole system," Ms. Williams said. "A lot of things are
different down here."
Robert Cahanin and his wife, Chenette, never complained when their older
child, Matthew, got a few swats for leaving his seat or ignoring directions.
But it was different when Mrs. Cahanin picked up Megan, who weighed 68
pounds, from school that day last December. Megan started to cry. Then she
showed the bruises.
"She had to give me a reason why she hit Megan that hard," Mrs. Cahanin said
of the principal, Judy Rials, who had administered the customary three
licks. "If I had done that to Megan, I would be consulting an attorney to
get me out of jail."
When she heard of the Cahanins' complaints, Joy Ebarb, DeWayne's mother,
began to question the repeated paddling of her son, who takes Ritalin for
attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. DeWayne says the paddling does not
hurt. But his mother says he has started to flinch when she reaches to hug
him.
At school, Mrs. Rials keeps the Ten Commandments posted behind her desk,
along with the aphorisms "When we tolerate everything . . . we stand for
nothing," and "That which doesn't kill you will make you stronger." The
teachers have 3-by-9- inch paddles, most made by students in wood shop; Mrs.
Rials's, about six inches longer, was taken by the district attorney's
office, which cleared her after an investigation into the paddling of Megan.
"It's not our favorite part of the day," Mrs. Rials said of paddling, which
she has done hundreds of times in four years as principal. But it is better
than suspension, she said, particularly for fourth graders, who must pass a
state test to be promoted. "You can't educate a child if they're not in the
classroom," she said. "Keeping children from the classroom could be
devastating. It could change their lives."
Since her paddling, Megan Cahanin has started biting her nails and, most
mornings, tries to avoid going to school, her parents say.
The Cahanin and Ebarb lawsuits, against the school district and Mrs. Rials,
argue that corporal punishment violates the guarantee of equal protection,
since it is illegal for those in authority to hit prisoners, nursing home
residents or children in foster care.
The question has generated scores of messages on a community forum on the
Internet, and gossip around town. Some accuse Megan's parents of beating her
themselves, or blame them for showing the snapshots around. Others suggest
that the whole school district, the entire town hierarchy, is corrupt.
People quote religious maxims, and talk about when they were coming up.
"The Lord said, Spare the rod, spoil the child, and I think he knows a lot
more than those bleeding-heart liberals," Pat Ebarb (no relation to
DeWayne), the police chief in nearby Noble, said over coffee and cigarettes
at Bill & Sissy's Cafe. "A child needs discipline. I don't believe they
ought to be abused or mistreated, but if they need their behind dusted, let
them get it."
Tears come whenever Mrs. Cahanin takes out those pictures of her daughter's
bruised buttocks. With sorrow, she recalls a moment months before when Megan
was playing school in her room, swinging a fly-swatter at her dolls'
backsides, and wishes she had signed a paper that would have prohibited
paddling her daughter.
Megan, sitting on her parents' back porch watching a downpour hit Toledo
Bend Lake, said, "You try to forget about it, but sometimes you just can't."
"It's so painful seeing that lady every day," she said. "Whenever I see a
paddle, I just move away."
The New York Times
Blessings,
Susan
wife to Jerry
mom to Zach, Jessica, Nathan, Hannah, Rachel and Benjamin
Dahlem's Handcrafted Soaps
www.dahlemshandcraftedsoap.com
"You'll learn things in this house that they'll never teach you in school"
Aunt Frances ~ Practical Magic
(what you all know as counties...here in Louisiana we tend to NEVER change)
and I went to school with this principal and it is just a big old hairy
mess...another one. I never ever regret what I miss from not being a part
of the school system.
Friday, May 04, 2001
Zwolle paddling case makes New York Times -from the Sabine News
From The New York Times: ZWOLLE, La. — Laid out on the kitchen table, the
snapshots of 10- year-old Megan Cahanin make a grim collage. They are not of
her sweet face, but of her bare behind. There are 12 in all, taken, her
mother says, day by day as the doughnut- shaped bruises on each cheek faded
from a mottled purple to a dirty gray.
By JODI WILGOREN
ZWOLLE, La. — Laid out on the kitchen table, the snapshots of 10- year-old
Megan Cahanin make a grim collage. They are not of her sweet face, but of
her bare behind. There are 12 in all, taken, her mother says, day by day as
the doughnut- shaped bruises on each cheek faded from a mottled purple to a
dirty gray.
Megan's father, Robert Cahanin, recalls that when he first saw the bruises,
hours after she was paddled by her school principal for elbowing a friend in
the cafeteria, he collapsed on the floor, crying. Then he picked up the
phone and called the police, the school board, the governor, his lawyer.
"It hurt me more than it hurt Megan," Mr. Cahanin said in a twist on the old
parental prespanking saw. "You don't hit on my baby."
Megan, a fourth grader whose name appears more often on the honor roll than
on a referral slip to the principal's office, is one of millions of public
school students still subject to corporal punishment, and in March her
family joined a small but apparently growing number who are suing to stop
it. Megan's classmate DeWayne Ebarb, a hyperactive child who has been
paddled regularly throughout his time at Zwolle Elementary — on 17 occasions
in 8 weeks last fall alone — filed a second suit in late April, leaving this
close- knit logging town of 2,000 pondering a practice as old as time.
Though it gets little attention, corporal punishment in schools remains
legal in 23 states, and the United States Education Department's most recent
data show that 365,000 children were paddled in the 1997-98 school year,
most in a swath of Southern states that could be called the Belt Belt.
Yet recent debate over corporal punishment focuses largely on parents, with
even many pro-spanking psychologists and pediatricians loath to support the
principal's paddle. At the same time, though, some school districts and
states say they must increasingly rely on physical discipline as the public
pushes for a crackdown on student misbehavior.
And legislation pending in Congress as part of President Bush's education
package could expand the practice by giving teachers and principals broad
protection from liability for disciplinary actions.
"Almost every democracy in the world has bans on corporal punishment — we're
going in the opposite direction," said Robert Fathman of Dublin, Ohio,
president of the National Coalition to Abolish Corporal Punishment in
Schools. "You can't whack a prisoner, but you can whack a kindergarten
child."
But in many communities like Zwolle (pronounced zeh-WAH-lee), a hamlet about
80 miles south of Shreveport best known for its annual tamale festival,
parents and educators base their support for corporal punishment on two
powerful sources: the Bible, and their own experience.
"That's the way that I grew up, that's the way it's always been in this
society here," said Dan Leslie, superintendent in Sabine Parish, whose 12
schools include Zwolle Elementary. "You act ugly, you do something bad, you
get a whipping."
Of the 27 states that have banned corporal punishment in school, the first
was New Jersey, in 1867. Massachusetts came next, a century later, in 1971.
When Mr. Fathman started his crusade in 1984, after his own daughter landed
on the painful end of a paddle, five states had adopted bans. The 27th, West
Virginia, acted in 1994, following states that also include New York and
Connecticut.
The number of paddlings around the country, the Education Department figures
show, dropped from 1.4 million in the 1979-80 school year to 613,000 in
1989-90 to 470,000 in 1993-94. In many states that allow corporal
punishment, individual districts ban it, and in most schools that allow it
parents can sign a form exempting their children. Black students are 2.5
times as likely to be struck as white students, a reflection of what
researchers have long found to be more frequent and harsher discipline for
members of minorities.
Court challenges have been largely unsuccessful, given a 1977 decision by
the Supreme Court rejecting the notion that paddling is cruel and unusual
punishment. A decade later, a federal appeals court ruled that a New Mexico
girl held upside down and beaten had been denied due process, signaling that
school officials could be held liable for severe beatings. But similar
findings have been rare.
"The vast preponderance of the lawsuits challenging the use of corporal
punishment in individual instances are unsuccessful," said Charles Vergon, a
professor at Youngstown State University in Ohio who has studied the issue
for 15 years.
Families tend to win such cases, Professor Vergon said, only when educators
have "abused in a fairly significant way the public's trust."
The federal liability-protection legislation mimicks statutes in nine states
where paddling is popular, including Louisiana. Scott McLellan, a White
House spokesman, said the measure would head off frivolous lawsuits against
educators and cited a survey showing that 31 percent of high school
principals were involved in litigation last year, up from 9 percent a decade
earlier.
Many education and medical groups oppose corporal punishment, saying it
aggravates aggression and can cause depression.
But Robert Surgenor, a detective in Berea, Ohio, who wrote a recent book on
corporal punishment, said "pain is probably the most effective form of
discipline." Over 14 years, Detective Surgenor said, he investigated more
than 150 cases of children who had assaulted their parents and found that
fewer than 2 percent had been subjected to corporal punishment, a much
smaller proportion than in the community as a whole.
Emily Williams, a kindergarten teacher in rural Mississippi, said that when
she arrived from Williams College last year, she was horrified to hear
teachers striking students in the hallways, the classroom and the cafeteria.
But by March, frustrated by her own inability to control her class, she had
picked up the paddle herself.
"It's so easy to say that's crazy or that's brutal or unnecessary or savage,
but it's part of the whole system," Ms. Williams said. "A lot of things are
different down here."
Robert Cahanin and his wife, Chenette, never complained when their older
child, Matthew, got a few swats for leaving his seat or ignoring directions.
But it was different when Mrs. Cahanin picked up Megan, who weighed 68
pounds, from school that day last December. Megan started to cry. Then she
showed the bruises.
"She had to give me a reason why she hit Megan that hard," Mrs. Cahanin said
of the principal, Judy Rials, who had administered the customary three
licks. "If I had done that to Megan, I would be consulting an attorney to
get me out of jail."
When she heard of the Cahanins' complaints, Joy Ebarb, DeWayne's mother,
began to question the repeated paddling of her son, who takes Ritalin for
attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. DeWayne says the paddling does not
hurt. But his mother says he has started to flinch when she reaches to hug
him.
At school, Mrs. Rials keeps the Ten Commandments posted behind her desk,
along with the aphorisms "When we tolerate everything . . . we stand for
nothing," and "That which doesn't kill you will make you stronger." The
teachers have 3-by-9- inch paddles, most made by students in wood shop; Mrs.
Rials's, about six inches longer, was taken by the district attorney's
office, which cleared her after an investigation into the paddling of Megan.
"It's not our favorite part of the day," Mrs. Rials said of paddling, which
she has done hundreds of times in four years as principal. But it is better
than suspension, she said, particularly for fourth graders, who must pass a
state test to be promoted. "You can't educate a child if they're not in the
classroom," she said. "Keeping children from the classroom could be
devastating. It could change their lives."
Since her paddling, Megan Cahanin has started biting her nails and, most
mornings, tries to avoid going to school, her parents say.
The Cahanin and Ebarb lawsuits, against the school district and Mrs. Rials,
argue that corporal punishment violates the guarantee of equal protection,
since it is illegal for those in authority to hit prisoners, nursing home
residents or children in foster care.
The question has generated scores of messages on a community forum on the
Internet, and gossip around town. Some accuse Megan's parents of beating her
themselves, or blame them for showing the snapshots around. Others suggest
that the whole school district, the entire town hierarchy, is corrupt.
People quote religious maxims, and talk about when they were coming up.
"The Lord said, Spare the rod, spoil the child, and I think he knows a lot
more than those bleeding-heart liberals," Pat Ebarb (no relation to
DeWayne), the police chief in nearby Noble, said over coffee and cigarettes
at Bill & Sissy's Cafe. "A child needs discipline. I don't believe they
ought to be abused or mistreated, but if they need their behind dusted, let
them get it."
Tears come whenever Mrs. Cahanin takes out those pictures of her daughter's
bruised buttocks. With sorrow, she recalls a moment months before when Megan
was playing school in her room, swinging a fly-swatter at her dolls'
backsides, and wishes she had signed a paper that would have prohibited
paddling her daughter.
Megan, sitting on her parents' back porch watching a downpour hit Toledo
Bend Lake, said, "You try to forget about it, but sometimes you just can't."
"It's so painful seeing that lady every day," she said. "Whenever I see a
paddle, I just move away."
The New York Times
Blessings,
Susan
wife to Jerry
mom to Zach, Jessica, Nathan, Hannah, Rachel and Benjamin
Dahlem's Handcrafted Soaps
www.dahlemshandcraftedsoap.com
"You'll learn things in this house that they'll never teach you in school"
Aunt Frances ~ Practical Magic
Valerie
Susan...
This story makes me ill. My parents live very near Zwolle in
Hornbeck. In our private email I didn't realize you were in
Louisiana. That's where I'm from (until 3 months ago). I deleted
your address or I would have written this privately. Would you email
me again and let me know where you are?
love, Valerie
I certainly wish I knew how to get someone's email address from here
without asking.
--- In Unschooling-dotcom@y..., "The Soap Maven" <jsdahlem@b...>
wrote:
This story makes me ill. My parents live very near Zwolle in
Hornbeck. In our private email I didn't realize you were in
Louisiana. That's where I'm from (until 3 months ago). I deleted
your address or I would have written this privately. Would you email
me again and let me know where you are?
love, Valerie
I certainly wish I knew how to get someone's email address from here
without asking.
--- In Unschooling-dotcom@y..., "The Soap Maven" <jsdahlem@b...>
wrote:
> I hope it is okay to post this here. This little school is in ourParish
> (what you all know as counties...here in Louisiana we tend to NEVERchange)
> and I went to school with this principal and it is just a big oldhairy
> mess...another one. I never ever regret what I miss from not beinga part
> of the school system.
>
> Friday, May 04, 2001
>
> Zwolle paddling case makes New York Times -from the Sabine News
>