PROVIDENCE — As assistant principal Robert Perkins tells it, last Friday was a frustrating day at Roger Williams Middle School.

It began badly. Perkins was in the corridor when he saw three students racing down the hallway waving a Dominican flag, which got quite a response from other students who were celebrating Dominican Independence Day. Perkins took the flag away and told the boys that he wouldn’t tolerate any behavior that would disrupt the school day. He told the students that he would keep the flag until the end of class.

Later, Perkins said he walked through the school, with the flag tucked under his arm. A teacher approached him and asked if he planned to “lock down” the school because students had been so unruly.

“It was crazy that day and the day before,” Perkins said in an interview last night with Dan Yorke, a talk show host on WPRO. “I don’t know why. It was just the vibe.”

After disciplining the three students, Perkins met with a concerned parent, was waylaid by a couple of teachers who needed help with some disruptive students, then walked into the school cafeteria, where he discovered a mess that students had left behind.

“I was at my wit’s end,” said Perkins, who calls himself a disciplinarian. “I had had it. Everything was laying on me that day. I threw that flag on the ground and I stepped on it.

“But I didn’t do it out of anger,” he said. “I didn’t do it out of anger for the flag or the kids. I’m just glad it wasn’t a baby.”

Perkins said there were no students present when he stepped on the flag. And he denied an earlier allegation in which he supposedly said, “I’ll mop the floor with your flag.”

“Never, never, never,” he said. “That never happened. That never was said.”

But the bad day only got worse.

At lunch, a major food fight broke out in the lunch room. According to the police report, several students began singing and banging on the table, and then two students began throwing apples and bread at another table. Before long, a large crowd of students began screaming and running around the cafeteria, “creating an unsafe environment,” according to the police.

When the police tried to place one student in custody, another boy interfered and began yelling at the patrolmen. The teen repeatedly refused to calm down even after the police ordered him to do so. After the police and the school administrators got the cafeteria under control, three students were brought to the police station, where they were arrested and charged with disorderly conduct.

Yesterday, Perkins said that the food fight had nothing to do with the flag incident. But by the end of the day, he said that he had suspended about 20 students, some for the food fight, other students for inappropriate dress.

Perkins went home and returned to work on Tuesday. (Monday was a snow day).

Around 10 a.m., Perkins said he got a phone call from principal Rudolph Moseley. The middle school director, Denise Carpenter, met him in his office and told him he would have to leave Roger Williams immediately.

“She said, ‘You’ll be getting a letter from human resources,’ and that’s it,” Perkins said. “She couldn’t, she wouldn’t, tell me what was going on.”

On Wednesday, Perkins said he received a letter saying that he had been placed on administrative leave pending the results of an investigation. He said he didn’t know why he had been suspended until he read yesterday’s Providence Journal. Perkins said he was disappointed that Supt. Tom Brady didn’t speak with him before placing him on leave.

“Mr. Brady, you have tarnished my reputation,” Perkins said. “I’m on the front page of the Journal, above the sex offenders. This issue is more important than those issues.”

Brady, in an e-mail that he sent out on Tuesday, wrote that an administrator at Roger Williams had “displayed a lack of judgment and cultural insensitivity in his actions toward students who were demonstrating pride in their Dominican heritage.” Brady also wrote that “such blatant disregard for the culture of another by any member of the Providence School Department is never to be tolerated.”

Brady, who never identified Perkins by name, also apologized to the students and their families for the apparent actions of the assistant principal.

Yesterday, Perkins said he would love to return to work, but Mayor David N. Cicilline said that he should be fired if, in fact, he stomped on the Dominican flag: “This behavior is totally unacceptable and has no place in our schools.”

School officials, including Brady, declined to discuss the matter further yesterday. But principal Moseley said the public perception of the school has been improving, along with students’ test scores.

— With reports from Maria Armental and Alisha A. Pina.

lborg@projo.com