Thirty states have outlawed corporal punishment in schools since the first state in the union made it illegal 150 years ago. Georgia is still not one of those schools. Corporal punishment in the Georgia school system includes the acts of paddling, spanking, and hitting students as a form of discipline. In this video, Atlanta’s 11Alive news reports that some students’ parents have even asked certain school’s to discipline them in this form. The station filed a Freedom of Information Act with the State Board of Education and discovered 21,792 incidents of corporal punishment in the 2010-2011 school year.

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A Georgia chapter reports that corporal punishment is any punishment designed to cause pain. Less than 90 minutes away from Atlanta, Polk County schools have 212 incidents reported and more than half of the incidents came from local high schools.

They claim that students chose corporal punishment in lieu of other disciplinary actions. It is reported that at the beginning of the year, schools send out a note asking if parents would like to opt out of the use of corporal punishment, and in that case they must send in a doctor’s note so that the child will not be disciplined with the use of corporal punishment. Georgia laws set very few rules in the case of corporal punishment within various counties, and each local school board then has their own set of rules.

In Georgia’s school districts, rulings will be based upon local control and laws. According to the ACLU, 102 counties in Georgia still practice corporal punishment.