DATE: Thursday, May 29, 1997                TAG: 9705290425

SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B1   EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: BY PAUL CLANCY, STAFF WRITER 

DATELINE: VIRGINIA BEACH                    LENGTH:   70 lines

STUDENT, 14, SUES SCHOOL FOR PADDLING HIM TOO HARD TEACHERS AT TABERNACLE BAPTIST SCHOOL SAY THE PUNISHMENT FIT THE CRIME.

A 14-year-old student has taken Tabernacle Baptist School into court for bruising him with a paddle.

In testimony Wednesday in Circuit Court, Luis Viner claimed that two teachers whacked him with excessive force to punish him for disciplinary infractions in January 1996.

The private school, which states that corporal punishment is sanctioned by God, contended that Viner disrupted his eighth-grade Bible and economics classes and that the punishment fit the crime.

Parents sign agreements that paddling may be used, but the question the jury must decide is whether it was excessive.

``The paddling is to get their attention and get them back in line,'' testified Carl Bieber, the school's principal for 24 years.

It got the attention of Viner and his mother, Loida Garcia, who are suing the school for $100,000 in punitive and compensatory damages for injuring and humiliating Viner.

The string of events that led to three whacks to the buttocks began with Viner's infatuation with a girl.

While at Plaza Middle School, Viner admitted, he fell for a schoolmate who associated with members of a teen gang.

``I could never get her attention,'' the youth said on the witness stand. So he said he began to hang out during lunch breaks with gang members. ``Every day it seemed more and more I wanted to be like the gang members.''

He agreed with his mother to switch to a stricter private school, picking out Tabernacle Baptist from a Yellow Pages advertisement. The school is located off Providence Road in Kempsville.

He spent half of his eighth-grade school year at Tabernacle with no problems more serious than dress code violations.

But in January 1996, in Randy Tichnell's Bible class, he joked about having cigarette butts and beer cans in his room at home. He was kidding, he said, and Tichnell took it as a joke, but warned him it was inappropriate to even discuss such matters. Then, when Viner said he remarked that one of the students was being a ``nerd,'' Tichnell told him to step outside.

The teacher summoned another teacher as witness and took the student to the library. Then, after praying with Viner that the punishment would improve his behavior, Tichnell administered two whacks with a 2-foot-long, 3-inch-wide wooden paddle.

Where was he struck? Viner's lawyer, Michael Robusto, asked in court Wednesday.

``On my buttocks,'' Viner said, shrugging and smiling shyly at the jury of seven.

``The first one stung, the second one hurt,'' he said.

But that wasn't the end of the day's punishment.

At an economics class that afternoon, Viner said, his only offense was being bored and looking at the blackboard through a hole in his three-ring notebook. Some students laughed and the teacher, Darren Vance, again told him to step outside, testimony indicated.

This time, following the school's policy of no more than three whacks, Vance applied one blow to the same region. And this time it was much more painful, Viner said.

The next day his mother took him to a doctor, who found Viner had contusions or bruises where he had been struck.

Asked if the school's paddling policy is to hurt the students, Bieber said it was not. But when asked whether the blow, delivered with no more than a 90-degree swing, could result in a bruise, he answered: ``It could be a bruise.''

The youth went home and never returned to Tabernacle, transferring to Larkspur Middle School. He's now in ninth grade at Princess Anne High School, where he said he's well-adjusted and making straight A's.

The jury is expected to weigh the case today after testimony concludes. KEYWORDS: LAWSUIT PADDLING CORPORAL PUNISHMENT ASSAULT

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