PAGE 4, WEDNESDAY, JULY 21, 1982, WHITBY FREE PRESS whitby Voice of the County Town FPuti Michael lan Burgess, Publisher- Managing Editor The only Whitby newspaper independently owned and operated by Whitby residents for Whitby residents. L ,Iished every Wednesday by M.B.M. Publishing and Photography Inc. Phone 668-61Il The Free.Press Building, 131 Brock'Street North, P.O. Box 206, Whitby, Ont. MICHAEL J. KNELL Communlty Editor MARJORIE A. BURGESS Advertising Manager Second Class Mail Registration No. 5351 The Durham board's draft discipline polie yignors the established law, sohow will they impiement it? To put it bluntly, the Durham Board of Educa- tion's draft policy statement on discipline is a far- ce. it is all show and no substance. The statement opens quite nicely: "It is the policy of the Durham Board of Education to main- tain within the schools under its jurisdiction a code of behaviour for both students and staff that respects the integrity of the Individual, the rights of persons in schools, and the responsibilities of such persons to the school community.", Well, no one can disagree with that. However, once you turn the pages of the report, things start to fall apart.- The major problems with the-report are simple: it has not defined corporal punishment; it has not established a set of punishments; it has not esta- biished a code of behaviour (for both staff and stu- dents); and, it has not said what will be acceptable process for determining punishment. Therefore, the report is incomplete. Under the heading of "unacceptable methods of discipline by staff" it says quite plainly "the board disapproves of the use of physical punish- ment." However, the most damaging part of the report is "....the use of physical punishment in our After a weekend up to my hocks in mother earth, in the vegetable garden, I just want to say that if farmers are grumblers, they have a right. We've been comparing weekend sunburns today, and l'm the only one in the newsroom that got it in the neck. It is no accident that the world's.agricultural mainstays are called red necks. That is the only part of your body that can't be protected when you're grubbing about in the soil. i'm not complain- ing you understand,,or bragging either. I'm no farmer. I don't think I've got the strength or the patience or the nerve for it. i won't'deny that like many members of the first or second or third generation away from the farm, there are times when i get the rose-colored glasses on and imagine myself as a true son of the soil. But even in this day of mechanization, it is back-breaking,-heart- breaking labour. For a whjle on Sunday morning, I .watch- ed the tobacco farmers n à door painstakingly filling their boxes with plants plucked>from the greenhouse floor, one by one. When they had a truckful, they went off to plant them, one by one. i don't even want to think about plan- ting 40 acres of tobacco, acre by agonizing acre. And that's just part of it. They had to steam clean every inch of soil in the greenhouse before they put the seeds in. They've been ploughing and harrowing and sanitizing the fields, it seems almost non-stop, ever since. They've manured the fields too, and after the plants are in, it will have to be fertilized again. You have to know what you're doing. There are a thousand chances to make a mistake. And there are some things you can't control. Hail, for ex- ample, and rain. If it doesn't rain enough, they'll have to irrigate, which means a wearying waltz with 30 foot sec- tions of pipe, and praying there's one good shot left in the pond, shrunken from lack of rain. Even if the grow- ing season is perfect, you can blow the crop in the kins. No, l'Il settle for being an honorary red neck. I'm more likely to survive this way. That's not news, but that too is reality. schools will be discontinued by 1984 06 30 (June 30, 1984)." The report also claims that It has taken into con- sideration the provisions of Section 43 of the Criminal Code of Canada which states: "Every schoolteacher, parent or person standing in the place of a parent is justified in using force by way of correction toward a child or.pupil, as the case may be, who is under his care, if the force does not exceed what is reasonable under the circum- stances."1 It is also interesting to note that at a recent national convention of school board trustees a vote was taken to confirm their desire to preserve the rights outlined in Section 43. The report also does not address the use of detentions since it is a form of incarceration and incarceration is deemed to be corporal punish- ment by most legal experts in the country. Now it appears that the strap is out, touching a student for whatever reason is out and giving him a detention is out. Therefore, the question still remains: what is an acceptable form of punish- ment? This brings us to another question: do the vast majority of parents want to abolish corporal punishment? While we have no evidence to con- firm this, we would think the answer to be no. Af- ter all, the vast majbrity of parents probably use corporal.punishment to correct their children. . We live in an ever more violent society and un- fortunately it seems that our children (especially those in the teen-age years) are more than im- pressed with this. They become violent and some- times the only means of dealing with them is cor- poral punishment. It is not an alternative we like, but it is sometimes necessary. If the Durham board bans Its use, then they could cause more problems than they solve. Another problem this draft policy presents is a legal one. Because the laws enacted by Parlia- ment are supreme, a. policy enacted by this board will not negate it. Therefore, a teacher or principal can legally ignore the policy and stand on his or her Section 43 rights. So, If the board wants to see this. policy in place, it is going to have to convince Parliament to repeal this section of the Criminal Code. And in the light of the vote mentioned previously that will be a more than difficult task. The feelings of parents, the legal problems, the definitions and the other problems brought for- ward here still come back to the original question: If the Durham Board of Education bans the use of corporai punishment, what is it going to use as an alternative, and furthermore, will that alternative be acceptable to the parents and taxpayers? Whitby Trustee John Buchanan was correct when he said that the report "either goes too far or not far enough." Until the trustees can complete the report to the satisfaction of the electorate they should not at- tempt to tamper with corporai punishment. COI\)FEPENC)E Q(é> 1MEC OU1)D