|
|
|
People Opposed to Paddling Students or POPS, Inc. Contact information: Jimmy Dunne, President 1306 W. Brooklake Dr., Houston, TX 77077
281.584.9707 jimmydunne7@comcast.net Donations appreciated. Privacy statement: All personal and credit card information will remain strickly confidential. Your name will not be shared with any other group or business. Donate now!
|
|
People Opposed to Paddling Students or POPS is a 501(c)(3)non-profit organization which is working to abolish corporal punishment in the schools and to educate parents about the negative effects of spanking at home.
See YouTube video by Jimmy Dunne on 6-4-08 on why corporal punishment should be abolished from U.S. schools. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Thdjv5NEp08 Corporal punishment allowed in nearly half of U.S.
By Bethany Barnett, contributing writer October 5, 2006
Though banned in a majority of states, corporal punishment is still being used to whip some students into shape.
According to Staunton City Schools Superintendent Harry Lunsford,
corporal punishment is banned in 28 states but is still widely
practiced in the "Bible Belt" states of the Deep South and in parts
of the Midwest.
Jimmy Dunne, a former teacher from Houston currently works to abolish corporal punishment, which he calls "legalized child abuse." In 1981, he founded POPS — People Opposed to Paddling Students. The organization holds demonstrations outside of schools where paddling is practiced, and speaks out to superintendents and principals of these schools and districts.
During his first year as a middle school math teacher, Dunne took
part in paddling to reprimand students.
"I started thinking, why are we doing this?" he said. "A teacher down
the hall was paddling kids every week. An 11-year-old boy crying,
begging for mercy is a pitiful situation."
Though corporal punishment has been banned in Virginia, it still
takes place in Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, Arkansas and Texas, according to the New York Times. While the practice is in decline, Dunne and his supporters are stunned that it is still legal in the first place.
"Some teachers get some sadistic pleasure paddling kids," Dunne
said. "With POPS, people tell us about specific cases and we go to
the school board."
However, some still see corporal punishment as an effective tool.
Anthony Price is a principal at a middle school in Fort Worth, Texas,
and recently reinstated the practice of paddling in his school.
"I'm a big fan," Price said in a New York Times article. "If used
properly, along with other punishments, a few pops can help turn a
school around."
Dunne disagrees. He believes that physically punishing students at
school encourages the same abuse at home. According to the POPS Web site, in Texas, child fatalities caused by abuse were up more than 10 percent and twice as many children died from abuse as from the previous decade.
While corporal punishment may not directly be the cause of such
abuse, it certainly does not demote the practice. Will Williams is a
musician in Maryland who remembers paddling and other forms of abuse taking place when he attended a Rhode Island Catholic school in the 1960s. In elementary school, en route to the bathroom, one of the nuns tripped and fell.
"She looked at me and said, `You tripped me!'" he said. "A younger
nun shook me, smacked me a few times, and took me to a wire cage where the custodian's equipment was held. She locked me in there until everyone had gone to the bathroom.
Williams recalls a classmate of his being paddled in the office at
school. "The nun accidentally left the intercom on, and everyone
could hear the kid crying," he said.
Ultimately, those against corporal punishment see it as a problem for children's future actions. In 2004, Dunne sent a letter to a
newspaper in Groveton, Texas, concerning a fifth-grade-boy who had been badly beaten by a coach.
"Adults are role models for children's behavior," he said. "When we
hit, slap or spank, children learn to hit."
Legislation sponsored by Rep. Alma Allen and Sen. Juan Hinajosa is being written to virtually abolish corporal punishment in the 2009 Texas Legislature, 29 states have banned this brutal and archaic practice. Paddling not only hurts school children it PROMOTES more child abuse in Texas homes.
More than 200 Texas children died from abuse or neglect in the past fiscal year, up 11% from the previous year and double the number from a decade earlier, according to the state Dept. of Family and Protective Services
The 2004 fatality rate, 3.3 per 100,000 Texas children is 65% higher than the national average of 1.98 per 100,000 from the federal Dept. of Health and Human services.
In fiscal 2003, Texas had 184 child fatalities related to abuse or neglect, in 1994 it was 102.
Call Jimmy Dunne at 281.584.9707 in Houston or email jimmydunne@sbcglobal.net YOU can make a difference. Join our POPS email list. Hitting children with boards is legalized child abuse. It often leaves bruises and causes psychological problems.
School paddling has been abolished in all European countries and in 29 of our states. It remains primarily in the "Bible belt" southern states.
|
|
|
SPANKING: We are also working to educate parents to not spank their children. We are role models for children. When parents cuss, children learn to curse, when parents hit or spank, children learn to hit. FREE - Our No Spanking Zone posters with the Top Ten Reasons Not to Spank Your Child.
#9 Spanking teaches children to hit.
#1 Talking is better.
SEVENTEEN nations have outlawed corporal punishment (spanking) at home. They are: Austria, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Hungary, Iceland, Israel, Italy, Latvia, Norway, Portugal, Romania, Ukraine and Sweden. Congrats on taking a giant step toward a more civilized, less-violent society
|
|
Study: Spanking Kids Leads to More Aggressive BehaviorBy Alice Park Monday, Apr. 12, 2010 Time Magazine
Disciplining young children is one of the key jobs of any parent — most people would have no trouble agreeing with that. But whether or not that discipline should include spanking or other forms of corporal punishment is a far trickier issue. The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) does not endorse spanking for any reason, citing its lack of long-term effectiveness as a behavior-changing tactic. Instead the AAP supports strategies such as time-outs when children misbehave, which focus on getting kids to reflect on their behavior and the consequences of their actions. Still, as many parents can attest, few responses bring about the immediate interruption of a full-blown tantrum like a swift whack to the bottom. (See pictures of the evolution of the college dorm.) Now researchers at Tulane University provide the strongest evidence yet against the use of spanking: of the nearly 2,500 youngsters in the study, those who were spanked more frequently at age 3 were more likely to be aggressive by age 5. The research supports earlier work on the pitfalls of corporal punishment, including a study by Duke University researchers that revealed that infants who were spanked at 12 months scored lower on cognitive tests at age 3. "I'm excited by the idea that there is now some nice hard data that can back up clinicians when they share their caution with parents against using corporal punishment," says Dr. Jayne Singer, clinical director of the child and parent program at Children's Hospital Boston, who was not involved in the study. (Read "Should Kids Be Bribed to Do Well in School?") Led by Catherine Taylor, the Tulane study was the first to control simultaneously for variables that are most likely to confound the association between spanking and later aggressive behavior. The researchers accounted for factors such as acts of neglect by the mother, violence or aggression between the parents, maternal stress and depression, the mother's use of alcohol and drugs, and even whether the mother considered abortion while pregnant with the child. Each of these factors contributed to children's aggressive behavior at age 5, but they could not explain all of the violent tendencies at that age. Further, the positive connection between spanking and aggression remained strong, even after these factors had been accounted for. "The odds of a child being more aggressive at age 5 if he had been spanked more than twice in the month before the study began increased by 50%," says Taylor. And because her group also accounted for varying levels of natural aggression in children, the researchers are confident that "it's not just that children who are more aggressive are more likely to be spanked." What the study, published Monday in the journal Pediatrics, shows is that outside of the most obvious factors that may influence violent behavior in children, spanking remains a strong predictor. "This study controls for the most common risk factors that people tend to think of as being associated with aggression," says Singer. "This adds more credence, more data and more strength to the argument against using corporal punishment." Among the mothers who were studied, nearly half (45.6%) reported no spanking in the previous month, 27.9% reported spanking once or twice and 26.5% reported spanking more than twice. Compared with children who were not hit, those who were spanked were more likely to be defiant, demand immediate satisfaction of their wants and needs, get frustrated easily, have temper tantrums and lash out physically against others. The reason for that, says Singer, may be that spanking instills fear rather than understanding. Even if a child were to stop his screaming tantrum when spanked, that doesn't mean he understands why he shouldn't be acting up in the first place. What's more, spanking models aggressive behavior as a solution to problems. For children to understand what and why they have done something wrong, it may take repeated efforts on the parent's part, using time-outs — a strategy that typically involves denying the child any attention, praise or interaction with parents for a specified period of time (that is, the parents ignore the child). These quiet times force children to calm down and learn to think about their emotions, rather than acting out on them blindly. Spanking may stop a child from misbehaving in the short term, but it becomes less and less effective with repeated use, according to the AAP; it also makes discipline more difficult as the child gets older and outgrows spanking. As the latest study shows, investing the time early on to teach a child why his behavior is wrong may translate to a more self-aware and in-control youngster in the long run.
 |
|
|
|
|
 |
