Punched, hit with a chair and called “cracker” and “white boy” by students at his predominantly black and Latino Long Island high school, 23-year-old Giovanni Micheli was instructed by educators to just suck it up.

Instead, Micheli sued the Brentwood School District in federal court in 2010.

Tuesday morning, on day two of his trial, the district settled with him, the New York Post reports. News reports said the settlement was confidential. But Brentwood School District Superintendent Levi McIntyre told the Washington Gadfly Wednesday night that he believed it was for $90,000.

What happened?

Settlements on the eve of trials are common but rare once the proceedings are underway. A veteran litigator who did not want to be named tells the Washington Gadfly that it seems unlikely the School District was embarrassed into suddenly settling.

“It’s not that the kid testified and made the jury cry — or that he testified and was terrible. It’s not obvious what might have changed from two days earlier,” explained the litigator. “Perhaps the school district’s offer went up. Perhaps the plaintiff’s demand went down. Those things often happen just before trial, and maybe the negotiations just took a bit longer than usual.”

In his opening statement Monday Micheli’s lawyer, Wayne Schaefer argued that whites can suffer discrimination also.

“Giovanni was a minority because he was Caucasian [at Brentwood High School],” he argued. “This case is about discrimination against a minority student. … Our claim is that there was deliberate indifference because he was a Caucasian student complaining in a district where Caucasians are a minority.”

When Micheli complained about the alleged abuse he was told by school officials, mostly white, to just “project more self-confidence,” Schaeffer told jurors.

His parents asked for a transfer but were told, “If we do that for him, we would have to do that for all the white children.”

The students who beat him, identified as black and thin, were apparently never disciplined.

School attorney Jack Shields countered that trying to nail the perps would have been racist. “Had the district rounded up all African-American students who were thin, we’d be here for another reason.”

Saying he suffered from depression and anxiety, Micheli eventually transferred to a parochial school. His 2010 lawsuit, charging violations of the Americans with Disabilities Act and Disabilities in Education Act sought a rather modest $200,000 in damages.

Brentwood Superintendent Levi McIntyre declined to say what measures the district would take to ensure white students are not harassed in the future.