Arkansas Students Protested School Violence. Then This Happened.

GREENBRIER, AR — Students across the country walked out of their classrooms this week to honor the 17 people killed in a mass shooting in Parkland, Florida, on Valentine’s Day and to protest inaction on gun control. Some risked suspension. Others were handed detentions.

At a conservative school district in rural Arkansas, though, school officials decided to meet the anti-violence protests by inflicting some violence of their own: They swatted students with a wooden paddle.

That’s according to a tweet from Jerusalem Greer, the mom of one of three students who were struck by officials at Greenbrier High School, located about 40 miles north of Little Rock. Her son, Wylie Greer, a senior, later confirmed he was struck twice by the dean of students.

Greer said in a statement to the Daily Beast that the swats were not painful, "nothing more than a temporary sting on my thighs," but that the dean of students stressed that not all punishments "ended this way."

"I believe that corporal punishment has no place in schools, even if it wasn’t painful to me," he said in the statement. "The idea that violence should be used against someone who was protesting violence as a means to discipline them is appalling. I hope that this is changed, in Greenbrier, and across the country."

Greenbrier Public Schools officials said the kids weren’t disciplined because they protested, but because they didn’t ask permission to participate in the protest, according to media reports. Patch's request for comment to Superintendent Scott Spainhour was not immediately returned.

Emboldened by a growing protest movement, tens of thousands of U.S. students participated in the 17-minute walkout — a minute for each of the 17 people who were shot and killed by an AR-15-wielding gunman at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida. The students, born after the 1999 Columbine massacre in Denver, have never not known a time when school shootings were commonplace, and they are demanding change.

“This generation is not playing around,” tweeted Jerusalem Greer.

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Greer said her son was whacked “two times on the bum with a wooden paddle.”

She could have appealed the punishment, but instead supported her son’s decision to take the swats.

“He wanted to take a stand,” Greer said, adding she was “proud of my kid for his willingness to endure.”

The American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry has long opposed corporal punishment, which it defines as, "a discipline method in which a supervising adult deliberately inflicts pain upon a child in response to a child's unacceptable behavior and/or inappropriate language." As of 2016, it remained legal in 19 states, concentrated mostly in the South.

The students in the Arkansas protest Wednesday were given a choice of corporal punishment or two days of in-school suspension for protesting.

Corporal punishment is legal in some Arkansas school districts as long as parents give permission, according to Newsweek. Students so disciplined are most often hit on their legs or backsides with a wooden paddle, the report said.

In a Facebook discussion, Kay Cox called paddling “barbaric and ineffective,” but 30-year teacher Debbie Rook wrote that she had “given several paddlings” and that it changes students’ behavior in the classroom.

Greenbrier Public Schools, which is based in a town of roughly 5,000 people, first adopted the corporal punishment policy in 2005, according to the Beast, and last updated it in 2012.

The district's website includes its mission statement:

"The mission of the Greenbrier School District is to educate all students in a safe environment. We will provide a challenging curriculum for each student that promotes higher level thinking skills and develops working skills in technology. We are committed to empowering our students to become life-long learners, to be accountable for their own learning, and to develop skills necessary to be a responsible citizen in an ever-changing world."

(File photo by Karen Ducey/Getty Images)