In Holmes County, where 99 percent of the public school children are black, students say corporal punishment traditionally starts at daycare and Head Start centers, where teachers rap preschool-age students lightly with rulers and pencils, cautioning: “Just wait until you get to big school.”
At “big school,” the wooden paddle is larger — the employee handbook calls for it to be up to thirty inches long, half an inch thick, and from two to three inches wide — and the teachers sometimes admonish errant students to “talk to the wood or go to the ‘hood” (slang for choosing between the paddle and an out-of-school suspension).
