KERA

“He asked me to essentially bend over his desk, and he hit me three times,” Hooper told KERA News. “It was humiliating. It was so uncomfortable.” Now 31, Hooper is against corporal punishment – the practice of causing pain or discomfort to correct a behavior. And while most states across the country have banned such punishments in schools, Texas and 14 other states explicitly allow the practice. Texas had the fifth-highest rate of corporal punishment in the 2021-2022 school year, or about 2 incidents per 1,000 students, according to an analysis of the latest federal data by NPR. That amounts to 11,360 instances of corporal punishment. It’s driven by a relatively low number of Texas schools – 580 out of 8,924 schools in the state recorded at least one instance of the punishment — and parents can submit a signed statement to opt their kid out of it in schools where it’s allowed. Corporal punishments were also disproportionately given to children with disabilities. They accounted for 28% of the corporal punishment instances despite only making up 13% of the Texas public school population