On Thursday, Oct. 26, it was announced on the morning announcements that there would be some changes made to the current bathroom policy in an effort to curb poor student behaviors.
Behaviors that prompted this change include, “primarily, vandalism,” says principal Mr. Brian Pawlicki. “There’s been things such as broken toilet seats, broken sinks, broken pipes, [and] broken doors in the bathroom. There’s also vaping, and along with the vaping, students are vaping things they also shouldn’t be vaping – things that are more illegal.”
He continues, “Most of that is happening [during] that first time in the morning; that’s a long period of time. Some students walk in the door at 7 am, so they have about 25 minutes just in the halls that they’re using to hang out in the bathrooms. We’ve only had a couple of fights this year, and by chance, they were in bathrooms because of the people that hang out there.” The aim of the new policy is to, “crack down on [poor behavior] so that people are not loitering in the bathrooms.”
According to Pawlicki, the change in policy has seen some success. However, not everyone is a fan. “I didn’t mind it during class time, but in the morning, it’s just inconvenient,” says sophomore Mia Siegel. “Before, I used to go to the bathroom on the way to homeroom, but now I have to go to homeroom first, and it sucks because my homeroom is so far away from everything else. I can see where they were coming from with the rules, but now it’s annoying.”
Fellow sophomore Aiden Miranda agrees with Siegel, noting that he feels that the new policy is “really dumb,” and former student Corinne Hunter adds that she feels that the policy is “not indicative” of some members of the student body. “As a disabled person, [I think] this policy is terrible. If I had to go to the bathroom, I would have to walk an even more unnecessary amount and wear myself out in order to simply go to the bathroom,” she says.
According to administration, there has been a large amount of money that has been put into repairing damaged objects in the bathrooms. There is “specific money set aside” for the building, since things can be damaged “naturally,” but there is “only so much.” Pawlicki mentions that “we could do other things besides replacing pipes, or doors, or toilet seats. We could do things like paint a classroom, or make the building look nicer.”
He continues, “If it goes beyond our budget, we have to find money in other places at the end of the year to compensate for that, so it could be that we have to use money from other accounts to pay for repairs to the building. We only get so much for that, and if we go beyond that, we’ve got to find it in some of our other school funds…it would come from [pay] from parking because we can use that for activities, or we have to use that for other things in our building. [Instead,] we have to use it to fix our bathrooms.”