EDUCATION : Fighter for Discipline Spars With Critics : Denver assistant principal is assailed for suspending 97 disruptive students. Officials say he, too, violated rules.

Thank goodness for Ruben Perez, that is what all of the teachers at Horace Mann Middle School said when the assistant principal attempted to suspend 97 students for fighting, absenteeism and sassing back in class.

But Denver school district officials, arguing that Perez failed to fully document the infractions of many of those students, instead suspended the 41-year-old Perez for one day with pay and ordered that he take a crash course in disciplinary procedures.

Now, with Perez refusing to sign a letter of reprimand from Principal Martha Guevara limiting his disciplinary powers, Horace Mann Middle School has become--at least for the moment--the focus in the nation’s battle to rid schools of violence and nihilism.

And Perez, an Air Force veteran who taught Spanish in New Mexico before moving to Denver in 1992, has become a celebrity educator--making almost daily appearances on television and radio programs and granting a stream of interviews with newspaper and magazine reporters.

“All I wanted to do is make a good school better,” Perez said in his office, which is crammed with congratulatory balloons, posters and letters signed by teachers across the nation. “I would rather educate 90% of the kids than the 10% who aren’t doing what they are told to do and are dragging the others down with them.”

The wave of positive publicity, coupled with job offers from public and private schools seeking a no-nonsense educator who is unafraid to stand by his convictions, may have figured in local school district officials’ allowing him to keep his position--at least for now.

But that has not stopped them from speaking out against Perez, who arrived at Horace Mann with a reputation for taking a maverick stance against school administrators in Las Cruces, N.M.

“When you cross the line and are going to break the law, what kind of a model is that for youngsters?” asked Denver school district spokeswoman Patti Murphy.

But Woody Witte, parent of a seventh-grader at Horace Mann, said Perez should be applauded for having the guts to try to cut through the school district’s Byzantine procedures for punishing chronically errant students. For example, six steps are required before a student can be suspended and six suspensions are needed before an expulsion.

“The school system fits the paradigm of a dysfunctional family to a T,” Witte said. “What Perez did, I have no problem with. How he did it may have ruffled some feathers.”

Indeed, the officials’ primary concern is whether the students slated for suspension received sufficient warning and opportunity to reform, and whether Perez overstepped his mandate by waiting until the principal--who he concedes would not have approved--was out of town before attempting to bounce them.

There are also suggestions, lodged by angry community leaders and parents, that the suspensions would have unfairly targeted mostly Latino students. Others, however, point out that 78% of the northwest Denver school’s 785 students are Latino.

Nita Gonzales, co-chairwoman of Denver’s Latino Education Coalition, said Perez’s action was tantamount to “waging war on children instead of looking for solutions.”

There must be an alternative to “tossing 11- and 12-year-old students in to the streets,” she said, adding that “it hurts me that he would grandstand on the backs of children.”

“Ridiculous,” responded Perez, who insists he was only trying get parents more involved in remedying their children’s chronic disruptive behavior at school--and in the process bring a semblance of peace and order to a campus where guns, knives and drugs were not uncommon when he arrived.

In fact, Perez was originally hired to oversee discipline after all but one of the school’s 45 teachers signed a petition to the district complaining that discipline was inadequate at the school.

“There was an immediate change when Ruben arrived--he respected what the teachers had to say,” said Terri Freund, who has been a Horace Mann teacher for nine years. “We had to spend more time on discipline than on teaching.”

What irks Perez’s detractors is that he demands conformity to the rules by students, but does not seem to mind flouting district procedures or publicly challenging his superiors.

“This person should be willing to take the medicine he dishes out,” Gonzales said.

Perez, along with dozens of teachers here who have staged rallies on his behalf, is exasperated with charges of insubordination and iron-handed disciplinary tactics.

Nevertheless, he is intransigent about the righteousness of his actions, which he hopes will set an important example for a nation where there are nearly 3 million incidents of theft or violence on or near schools each year.

With that goal in mind, he vows to fight administrators until he is fired, if necessary.

“Through a blanket suspension, I was trying to bring attention to a problem,” Perez said. “I want the administration to know what they are up against--everything isn’t peachy keen.”