BOARD ALTERS POLICY   BY ED HUBER

June 25, 1992

A dress code requirement limiting the length of boys' hair was eliminated from Katy ISD's discipline management guidelines last week, but trustees turned back a challenge to drop corporal punishment (paddling).

Trustee Mary McGarr presented both amendments.  The first was approved by a 4-3 vote.  The amendment eliminating corporal punishment as a disciplinary technique was defeated by the same vote.

McGarr expressed concern for the children who are paddled and for the administrators who do the paddling.  She said the policy advocates the use of aggression to solve problems.

However, Trustee Larry M. Moore said the policy is part of the overall discipline plan and needs to be considered in the big picture.

He said each parent has a waiver that gives them the option to allow the district to discipline their children through corporal punishment.

Trustee Joe Adams said the board met previously with school principals, who indicated they would like paddling to be available as a disciplinary tool.  He said corporal punishment was not used extensively last year.

On the other hand, Trustee Kenneth Burton said that even though corporal punishment is appropriate at times, it is often used too readily.  Instead, parents should be inconvenienced by requiring that they become a part of the solution, he said.

Dissenting votes on the issue were cast by Garry Weiss, Kenneth Burton and Mary McGarr. [Voting to keep corporal punishment were Joe Adams, and Larry Moore.]

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Of note is the fact that I tried early on after I first got elected to get the school district to do something about a junior high coach who was paddling black students way too often, in my opinion. I had the statistics to show what he was doing, but I couldn't get him stopped, so this (stopping it all over the District) was the only way to do that, and I kept trying until I got it stopped all over the District.  I took a lot of heat for doing so, but I thought it was important to stop that coach no matter how I had to do it! Of course one couldn't talk about the real reasons for so much that was going on at that time. A statement was made that there had not been many paddlings the year of this vote.  I do not think that was correct.

As for the hair issue, one of my sons asked me to do that.  He said the kid who sat in front of him in his Physics class had green hair and looked like a chicken, but he said, "Mom, he's the smartest kid in the class, and his hair doesn't have a thing to do with anything!"

I asked my other son to get some of his classmates to come to the board meeting and speak in the Public Forum Session (those were the good old days when the Public Forum Session was at the beginning of the meeting and many people were there to hear what citizens had to say!) They came, and they made a good case.  One of the students had really long black hair, and he pointed out that he was going to be the Valedictorian at Taylor High School!

But you can see that it was still a 4-3 vote.  Of note (since he's running for office, again, is the fact that Joe Adams was on the opposite side from me in these votes.

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Another reporter, a smart Asian woman from the Suburbia Reporter, also called me for a comment.  I cannot find the article, but what I said, and what she printed was sort of amusing.

I told her that the bad news, (after my first try to get rid of corporal punishment had failed), was that our KISD students were going to keep on being paddled by our employees, but the good news was that they could have long hair while we paddled them.

She thought that was a humorous comment and printed it!