The Principal And The Paddle

Yet the majority of parents see Nixon's paddle as a deterrent, not a weapon. "I agree with the policy," says Tim Rhodes, 42, who has two children at John C. "Kids know if they do something wrong, they are punished." In Fran Brown's first-grade class last month, a brown-haired boy spat on a fellow student. Miss Brown strode to her computer, drawing a loud "oooooh!" from the class. She typed an e-mail to Nixon, who came right away. "I don't think it's right for kids to take away from the instructed time," says Brown. After a conversation in Nixon's office, the child was paddled at home. Parents are given the option of spanking their child themselves; on rare occasions, they come to the school and use their own belts.

John C isn't as bustling as typical elementary schools. The hallways are hushed as kids move wordlessly between classes, lined up single-file on the right side of each hallway, though they do bop and sashay in muted, youthful excitement. A severe budget crunch means the school will almost certainly have to let some teachers go. Still, John C is in much better shape than the state's woefully underfunded schools from the 2005 PBS documentary "Corridor of Shame," or the Dillon, S.C., school President Obama cited as needing repairs to block out the sound of passing trains. John C, with its sliced tennis balls on the ends of chair and desk legs, is shopworn but pristine.

Nixon has instituted many reforms over the last three years, and he's leery of focusing too much on paddling as a "fix-all." "The best form of discipline," he says, "is praise." He brings pizza for classes that perform well on tests, and he's plastered the teacher's lounge with statistics on each student's performance. In March, he held a school pageant, where boys and girls dressed in their Sunday best and did twirls onstage, with hundreds of parents giggling and snapping pictures.

But all the improvements, says fifth-grade teacher Karen Bass, were built on Nixon's bedrock of discipline. Bass was the teacher who left with her child years earlier. She returned when an administrator told her, "You should come back. It's different now." Bass says she likes her job so much she doesn't use her vacation days. "I'm oh so very pleased," she says. "And I can say that with full confidence because I've been other places."

Kids at the school say the paddle definitely makes them think twice about acting up. Asked if he's afraid of it, second-grader Nathan Hoover says, "Yes! It really hurts." The policy, he explains, is three strikes and you're struck. "I know if I got [paddled at school]," Nathan says, "my mom would whip me, too." Hoover's mother says she would give Nixon permission to paddle her child—parents only get the form if their child commits a major offense—but she's relieved that corporal punishment is only a "last resort." "Some kids see too much of that at home," Hoover says. They're no longer seeing much of it anymore at John C. According to Nixon, the last time he paddled a student was more than a month ago: March 16, after a fourth-grader swore in the cafeteria. Corporal punishment, it would seem, has worked so well at John C that perhaps the need for it no longer exists. Given Nixon's ambivalence toward the practice—indeed, he would not even allow NEWSWEEK to photograph the paddle—could it be that he's already delivered his last whipping? "I hope so," he says. But he quickly adds that there will always be "new kids who need to learn the limits at school." And one way or another, Nixon will make sure they get the message.

© 2009