Cunningham has retired. But the new principal, Stephanie Burton, still paddles, although she said the need had faded without the middle school kids. But gender differences remain at Harvest and every other county school. It's the same across the nation. According to the 1998-99 compliance report of the U.S. Office for Civil Rights, boys accounted for 80 percent of paddlings.
Black children are also over-represented.
Throughout the nation, black students are more than twice as likely to be spanked as white students. In Huntsville, African-American boys took 66 percent of the paddlings. But those boys comprise only 20 percent of the total student body. In Madison County Schools, whose student body is 13.4 percent African-American, black children accounted for 17.4 percent of the paddlings. Look across the country.