Three students in a rural part of Arkansas have allegedly been smacked for participating in Wednesday’s national walkout protesting against gun violence.

Despite that drastic punishment, one student’s mother, Jerusalem J. Greer, applauded her son and the other students at Greenbrier Public School for their defiant protest following the deadly shooting that killed 15 students and two adults at Stoneman Douglas High School last month in Parkland, Florida.

“My kid and two other students walked out of their rural, very conservative, public school for 17 minutes today,” Greer wrote on Twitter. “They were given two punishment options. They chose corporal punishment. This generation is not playing around.”

Greer later said that the students faced what the school calls “swats.”

According to Greenbrier Public School’s official policy, the school board “authorizes the use of corporal punishment to be administered in accordance with this policy by the Superintendent or his/her designated staff members who are required to have a state-issued license as a condition of their employment.”

The handbook says that before students are smacked they are to be “given an explanation of the reasons for the punishment and be given an opportunity to refute the charges. administered privately, i.e. out of the sight and hearing of other students.”

While 31 states across the U.S. have banned corporal punishment, four years ago The Washington Post reported that 19 states still allow administrators to hit students.

Greenbrier Public School, which is located in a town of roughly 5,000 people, only first adopted the seemingly outdated disciplinary policy in 2005 and last updated it in 2012.

The rural Arkansas school’s policy does caution administrations that the physical punishment should not be “excessive, or administered with malice” and should be administered in the presence of another school official or licensed staff member of the district.

The school’s assistant principal, Brett Meek, hung up the phone when The Daily Beast reached out for comment on the school’s regulations. The school’s superintendent, Scott Spainhour, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Wylie Greer, one of the students punished, spoke out in a statement to The Daily Beast late Thursday night: