Holding a wooden paddle, Springfield school board member Steve Makoski urged a return to corporal punishment.
“I would encourage board members to begin a dialogue — I brought a prop with me here — and that dialogue would be corporal punishment,” he said. “I think it’s something that we should talk about. I believe it could be used as one of our tools as part of discipline guidelines.”
Speaking during the board comment section at the end of a 4-1/2-hour meeting, Makoski outlined a series of steps he believed the district could take to address student behavior issues.
He said the Missouri School Boards’ Association, which advises districts on policy adoptions and revisions, ought to create a policy on corporal punishment that is not “cookie cutter” or “one-sided.” He announced plans Tuesday to write MSBA with that request.
“If a school district is to actually pursue a corporal punishment policy then MSBA ought to come up with some guidance on that rather than just stating in a policy that there is no corporal punishment,” he said. “There are a lot of districts in the state that use it and I think that we ought to take that under consideration as a board.”