In addition to bathrooms closed for maintenance or vandalism, the building services team is “continu[ing] their practice from previous years to lock one set of bathrooms on the first and second floor, which has been a successful tactic to manage student activities in the bathroom,” Business Administrator Arlin De la Rosa said.
With the prevalence of vaping on campus becoming a growing concern, students like freshman Ashrita Khetan speculate that the locking of bathrooms is a way to manage vaping on campus. “I don’t know what else could be a reason for locking the bathrooms but locking the bathrooms isn’t gonna stop people from vaping,” Khetan said.
Recently, students have noticed a sudden decrease in the availability of bathrooms. This epidemic is cause for concern as time in between classes is precious and can not be wasted on trivial pursuits. Therefore, the countless minutes spent searching for an unlocked bathroom is a daily concern for students and teachers alike. “I would say it’s getting very frustrating, regardless of the reason. If the reason is that kids are vaping in the bathroom, locking the bathrooms makes it inaccessible for people who actually have to pee,” Khetan said.
Whether closed for maintenance or as a punishment for bad behavior, the uptick has had negative impacts on the academic learning environment. “I have a lot of kids who go to the bathroom during class, I think because they have more time. Kids are always telling me they never know when a certain bathroom will be open, when it will be closed. It’s always a concern, and I understand why administration makes the decisions they do. But I don’t think that it’s good for kids to have to worry about whether they can go to the bathroom or not. To me that’s not really conducive to a strong learning environment,” English teacher Michelle Hanson said.
However, the issue seems to lie in the fact the locked bathrooms rotate without warning and present issues for participants in afterschool activities and outside visitors. “The selected bathrooms are different every day as they rotate through the bathrooms on each floor and they are locked before school, after school and during lunch,” De la Rosa said.
School security defends their practice. Security Team Leader Raymond Blankenship said, “The locked bathrooms are switched every day between first and second period and again between lunch and advisory, but remember that the security team doesn’t lock bathrooms in order to make your day more difficult.”
If students continue to encounter opposition from teachers in regards to long bathroom searches, “tell them to shoot security an email and we can look at the tapes and come to a mutual agreement,” Blankenship said.
