Anyone stuck in detention for the next week at PHS will be tasked with cleaning dried ketchup off the cafeteria walls and picking tater tots out of the radiators.

“This is at least 6 days of work,” said math teacher Marta Colter, the detention supervisor for the week, looking at the wreckage of broken chairs and crushed salad with dismay.

“Who knew PHS kids loved their chicken this much?” she adds.

And love it they do. Unrest began to spread the morning of May 26th, when Ms. Lyons’ recitation of the lunch menu for the day amazingly contained no mention of chicken. Any kind of chicken. No nuggets, no barbecue pizza, no wings, not even a gizzard. Several classrooms immediately erupted in chaos, a fact confirmed by the sighting of a desk flying out of a science wing window, but teachers were able to calm students by assuring them that it must be a mistake.

“We thought it must be,” said Dave Anderson, a study hall advisor who helped squelch one of the riots. “The cafeteria diet is 80% chicken. These kids have eaten chicken every weekday since they were in kindergarten. Why would there suddenly be no chicken?”

But lunch time would prove Anderson and his colleagues wrong. Students took to the lunch lines only to find teriyaki beef, grilled cheese sandwiches, pasta salad, and french fries plopped onto their trays. Not so much as a popcorn of chicken.

“The first thing we heard was this massive wailing,” said Jose Ramirez, a bagged-lunch student who was eating in an upstairs classroom. His eyes grow haunted at the memory. “It was biblical. Then everything went black.”

Ramirez is describing the moment when the rioters reached the main switch board and doused it with chocolate milk, causing the school’s electronic capabilities to fail. Thankfully the wifi was already down, so no further damage to the web connection was caused.

The situation in the cafeteria quickly dissolved. Reports of food and furniture projectiles and bottle rockets led one brave science teacher, Harold Jenkins, to charge into the cafeteria.

“He went in ahead of us,” said Laura Buchanan, one of the teachers involved in the crisis control force. “We heard growling and ripping noises, and then the remains of his clothing was thrown back into the hall.”

Buchanan holds up a tattered polo stained with what she frantically insists is ketchup.

“After that, we decided to focus on containment,” she said.

The doors to the cafeteria were barred and the rest of the school went on lockdown.

“It sounded like Noah’s Ark down there,” said one of the sheltering students.

The crisis control team was eventually forced to pump a powerful sedative in through the air vents.

“We were then able to enter the caf, retrieve Mr. Jenkins’ remains, and identify the students,” said administrator Jane Calvin.

The cafeteria staff have taken full responsibility for the incident.

“These kids were not in control of themselves,” The administration said in a statement. “Under those nutritional conditions, no other reaction could be expected.”

Students involved are not expected to face consequences.