January 11, 2012

Dear List Members & Friends of PTAVE,

We have begun mailing the below "Notice to Officeholder" to education policy makers and others in positions of influence in states that allow disciplinary beating of schoolchildren. Those states are: Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Wyoming.

Our first mailing, sent yesterday, targeted North Carolina. It went to, among other state officeholders, each of the 72 members of the North Carolina Senate and House Education Committees. This project will continue until we've covered all the above-listed states.

We invite you to join this effort by widely circulating the below text.

Wishing you a healthy and productive 2012,

Jordan Riak, Exec. Dir.,
Parents and Teachers Against Violence in Education (PTAVE)

Notice to Officeholder: Corporal punishment of students in the classrooms of your state is essentially equivalent to, and a legacy of, corporal punishment of slaves who labored in the cotton fields prior to emancipation. The motives, methods and results are similar. They spring from the same source. For a more detailed analysis, see "The Origin and True Purpose of the Paddle" at www.nospank.net/slave.pdf .