The girls’ bathrooms are often used as a space for students to hang out with their friends and eat. Some students will spend multiple class periods in the girls’ restrooms, locking themselves in a stall with their friends during lunch and staying there until school ends. This forces students who need to use the girls’ restrooms to spend extra time in line because one or more of the bathroom stalls are being used as a recreational space. Even when a stall isn’t full of students eating and socializing, it is still unpleasant to use a stall covered in crumbs and trash.
Although “bathroom eating” isn’t as much of an issue when it comes to the boys’ restrooms, students frequently dump various foods and drinks into the urinals and call the resulting concoction “soup.” The floor of the boys’ restrooms are frequently covered in wet paper towels, which students don’t bother to properly place in the garbage bin.
Drug use is a serious issue in both the girls’ and boys’ bathrooms. Students will sneak off to one of the bathrooms to smoke marijuana or vape, leaving everyone else who uses the bathrooms after them to put up with the smell. In the girls’ bathrooms, some students will attempt to cancel out the smell of weed or vape juice by spraying perfume or air freshener. However, this rarely successfully erases the smell of smoke and is dangerous for students with serious perfume allergies.
A more humorous addition to this school bathroom nonsense is a student known as “the barber” who has been giving haircuts in the boys’ restrooms for the better half of this year. The barber allegedly offers trims, cuts and fades for five dollars apiece. Students will excuse themselves during class to go to the bathroom, where they rendezvous with “the barber” and receive their haircut in one of the bathroom stalls.
When students eat in the bathrooms or stay in them for hours at a time, they leave behind large messes for the custodial staff to clean up. It is unpleasant to have to set your backpack down on a floor covered in juice and crumbs when you use the restroom; it must be even more unpleasant for the custodians who have to clean it up later. Can you imagine having to clean out the “soup” from the urinals at the end of the day?
The threat of Covid-19 makes these bathroom activities concerning as well. It isn’t safe for five to fifteen people to pack themselves into one bathroom stall where they take their masks off and eat right next to each other. Since it’s difficult to smoke or vape with a mask on, students who smoke in the bathrooms run the risk of spreading Covid-19 as well. Of course, smoking is a major health issue all on its own, but adding the risk of spreading Covid-19 makes the situation even worse.
Some students gather in large groups to illegally smoke marijuana in the bathrooms, creating a hotbox, which is another serious health and safety issue. Hotboxes themselves are dangerous; they can cause respiratory issues and dizziness due to the lack of ventilation in a room being used as a hotbox. In addition to this, filling an entire bathroom with smoke or vapor could potentially trigger a fire alarm or create a smog so thick that other students can’t see through it.
Students who make the selfish choice to loiter in the big stall displace disabled students, students who use drugs in the bathrooms are serious threats to the health of others as well as their own and students who eat in the bathrooms are just plain disgusting. With the exception of the barber’s misadventures, the mischief that takes place in the school bathrooms is immature and primitive.
