Bathrooms on Lockdown

The beginning of the school year was kicked off with a disastrous trend: Devious Licks. Students would trash the bathrooms so badly to the point that the bathrooms were shut down and an announcement to the entire school was sent out. School bathrooms throughout the nation were vandalized with soap, hand sanitizer dispensers, mirrors, and sometimes sinks and toilets being broken. Our school was not exempt from the destruction.

Although this trend happened many months ago, the remnants still seem to linger.

At Encinal, the bathrooms in the 200 building, outside the student center, and the gender neutral bathroom are frequently locked. The explanation for this is usually due to some sort of vandalism or graffiti.

This policy of shutting down bathrooms due to, often small, instances of vandalism are a major inconvenience. Sometimes, the bathrooms are locked for days on end. Many times, when going to the restroom, I have been treated with both the 200 building and the gender neutral bathrooms being locked

As students who were here in the 2019 - 2020 school year know, the bathrooms were incredibly chaotic. Sure, we had port-a-potties, but other than that there were just the bathrooms outside the media center that had three stalls, with one of them always being unusable. Forcing the entire school to use only one bathroom, which can cause congestion and is very inconvenient for nearly every student.

One student should not be able to ruin it for the rest of the student body, especially when it comes to a biological need that we cannot control. They also should not be locked for days on end.

Regarding graffiti and vandalism, I don’t believe that it is as big of a concern as the school may make it out to be. Yes, words and images with harmful messages should be removed immediately, but I often notice people just practicing their graffiti tags. Ink on a stall should not be more of a priority than letting students use the bathroom.

Supervisors and those with authority tend to say that one person can ruin it for everyone else as a means of holding your peers accountable and trying to control misbehavior. However, it is still unfair, and those authority figures often preface their announcement by saying so.

There seem to be two major options regarding this issue. Either continue doing what the school is currently doing, and shut down the bathrooms every week just for more graffiti to show up, or leave the doors open during school hours unless it’s necessary to close them.

The bathrooms being closed periodically throughout our school year is not the biggest problem. It is simply a minor inconvenience, but recurring inconveniences can get rather annoying. From the outside, there are other ways to effectively maintain the bathrooms without punishing students, and that is what the school should work on.