DATE: Friday, May 30, 1997                  TAG: 9705300680

SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B1   EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: BY PAUL CLANCY, STAFF WRITER 

DATELINE: VIRGINIA BEACH                    LENGTH:   76 lines

CHILD PADDLED IN SCHOOL WINS $5,000 VERDICT A BEACH JURY AGREES THAT THE FORCE WAS EXCESSIVE.

A jury Thursday administered a small but vigorous whack to a private school's policy of allowing teachers to paddle students to ``get them back in line.''

The Circuit Court panel found that teachers at Tabernacle Baptist School used excessive force in striking an eighth-grade student last year after the student ``acted up'' in class. The jury of four women and three men said the school must pay Luis Viner, now a ninth-grader at Princess Anne High School, $5,000 for bruising and humiliating him.

Though the amount is not high, it sends a message to school administrators ``that they cannot do whatever they want and get away with it,'' said Loida Garcia, the boy's mother.

Furthermore, she said, just the action of bringing the lawsuit caused Tabernacle Baptist to change its policy of giving teachers discretion to paddle students, placing that authority with the parent or principal.

The school's attorney, Robert Samuel, confirmed that the lawsuit prompted the policy change. He said the new policy would shield teachers from being subject to such lawsuits in the future.

Paddling, which the school policy manual says is in accord with God's word, has been in effect there for more than 20 years. Several other conservative, church-sponsored schools in the area also permit corporal punishment.

The jury award was made for two paddling incidents that took place on the same day in January 1996. That morning, all sides agree, Bible teacher Randy Tichnell decided that Viner had repeatedly disrupted the class. After taking him to the library and praying with him, the teacher had the student bend over and gave him two whacks on the rear end.

The same afternoon, Viner's economics teacher, Darren Vance, hit Viner once in the same spot after the student peered at him through one of the holes in his notebook, provoking laughter.

The paddlings resulted in a bruise and, the student said, humiliation. He left that day and never returned, transferring to Larkspur Middle School.

The jury awarded Viner $1,000 for the first paddling and $4,000 for the second after hearing arguments that the second was given without warning.

``This is what he gets for looking through a hole in his notebook,'' Viner's attorney, Michael Robusto, told the jury, holding up the 3-inch-wide, 2-foot-long paddle that resembles a cricket bat.

The paddles, with the words ``use other side'' stenciled on the non-business side, were made to order for each of the classrooms.

Several jurors had admitted that they were opposed to physical punishment, but said they could rule impartially in the case, which did not challenge paddling per se, just the way it was applied.

Four potential jurors were stricken from the original jury panel of 13 after saying they could not approve of paddling under any circumstances.

School Principal Carl Bieber would not comment after the verdict. He had testified Wednesday that the purpose of paddling at the school was to get students ``back in line.''

And Samuel, the defense attorney, said the award was relatively small, indicating that the jury ``certainly did not think it was a terrible event.''

Viner, along with his mother, had asked for $100,000 in damages. But they chose not inform the jury of the amount because, Garcia said, it was a question of principle, not money.

School policy permitted paddling, even if it resulted in bruises. Vance, who now teaches in Miami, said in a deposition read in court that he was relying on a passage from Proverbs, which says, ``The blueness of a wound cleanseth away evil.''

Asked if it is biblical to draw a bruise in the cause of child discipline, Vance said, ``If one occurs as a result of child discipline, that's fine.''

But Robusto, in his closing argument, said, ``This is 1997, and this is not the way we do it.''

Samuel attempted to convince Judge A. Bonwill Shockley that the complaint should be thrown out because the school ``stood in the shoes of Luis' parents'' in spanking him.

But Shockley ruled that the case was about the degree of the punishment and whether the school's rules were followed in administering it. It was clearly a jury question, she said. KEYWORDS: ASSAULT LAWSUIT INJURIES

PRIVATE SCHOOLS

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