L.A. educator was against spanking

Former president of the school board supported integration through busing in 1970s, which cost him reelection in the San Fernando Valley

- HOWARD BLUME

A CAREER CLOSE TO HOME

Robert Docter in front of Darby Avenue School, across from his Northridge home in 1992. He taught at Cal State Northridge.

Robert Docter, an L.A. school board member in the 1970s who successfully pushed to end corporal punishment and who sacrificed his political career trying to integrate campuses through busing, has died at 97.

Docter also taught for 56 years at Cal State Northridge and served for decades as a regional leader within the Salvation Army.

He died at home in Northridge from what family members describe as neurological complications on Nov. 3.

"He always could see the possibility for students and their teachers and their families," said Diane Watson, a former ally on the school board who went on to serve in the state Legislature and Congress. "You could follow him because you knew that he chose to do the right thing for the young people."

As a school board member from 1969-77, Docter was most closely identified with two issues — taking away the long-held right of school staff to hit children and trying to quickly and aggressively address the harms of segregation.

Docter had been a school board member for six years when he and allies, after multiple tries, pushed through a ban on corporal punishment — also referred to as spanking or paddling — by a 4-3 vote in 1975.

“It is child-beating and we should eliminate policies that permit child-beating,” Docter said. “Administrators and teachers should not be able to do what a Marine Corps drill sergeant is prohibited from doing.”

At the time, an estimated 7% of California districts had banned corporal punishment, although Gov. Jerry Brown had just signed a law requiring parental permission.

Banning corporal punishment also had been a primary demand of student and teacher activists who took part in widespread Latino student walkouts from L.A. schools in 1968.