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Post-Riot, Bathroom-Ban School Calms Down
By
Ben Yakas
Published Dec 11, 2010
Modified Dec 11, 2010
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By
Ben Yakas
Published Dec 11, 2010
Modified Dec 11, 2010
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On Thursday, shit was seriously stirred up at the Murry Bergtraum High School in Lower Manhattan, when Principal Andrew Lewis took away students bathroom privileges after a fight between two students. A twenty minute riot ensued, with kids screaming and running through the hallways like a tween version of a jailhouse riot, or a Justin Bieber concert. Yesterday, things were tense in the school, but remained under control thanks to an increased presence of guards. Those kids should have known they could always use Shell Bank Creek if they really had to go!
Meanwhile, students debated the relative merits of their ill-thought out protest. "It was chaos. We overreacted. I think we overreacted, but at the end of the day, she didn't have to be so assertive about everything," student Cynthia Solano told ABC. But United Federation of Teachers president Michael Mulgrew thinks the bathroom ban was too harsh: "What happened yesterday was absolutely a problem. And that's why we can't have that. I mean, you cannot have a building that goes out of control. And this is what we were concerned with. Because you have kids who were upset and were frightened, you have teachers put in harm's way. And that's just not acceptable." As they say, shit always flows downstream.
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andrea lewis
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Ben Yakas
Ben Yakas is a former Gothamist reporter.
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