The bathrooms in our school are often victims of mistreatment and have become difficult for the custodial staff to maintain. Because of this cycle, many of them are not open to students at all times since custodians have to close the bathrooms regularly in order to clean them. This situation can be frustrating for students who treat the bathrooms well and simply want to be able to access them.
After school on October 16, I went around to the 6 bathrooms that students regularly use. These are the bathrooms in the M, G, and H Buildings, the locker rooms, the Student Center, the ones near the football field, and the ones in the gym. Naturally, the main buildings’ bathrooms are the most frequently used while the ones in the Student Center, gym, and locker rooms are only used when students have classes there. The conditions of all of these bathrooms were varied. Unsurprisingly, the bathrooms harder to access seem cleaner than the ones in the main parts of campus. One thing I noticed is that some bathrooms, especially the M Building, didn’t have soap dispensers or paper towels, which can make it hard for people to find a different way to clean their hands and go back to class without soap available to wash up. Most of the time, bathrooms are shut down and cleaned after school, but sometimes careless student behavior in these bathrooms–like not throwing paper towels away or vandalizing a wall –requires custodians to have to close bathrooms earlier and focus their attention on certain bathrooms more than others.
Our custodians work hard enough as it is, doing yard work, repairs, upkeep, and other various tasks on top of addressing cleaning unnecessarily mistreated bathrooms. They work hard and do not deserve to have to constantly pick up after careless student behavior. Better student behavior in bathrooms would be a simple solution that would benefit both custodians and students. If we as students do a better job at respecting the school facilities, then more than six bathrooms could possibly be open because proper use and treatment of bathrooms would mean they would be easier for our custodial staff to clean and maintain. Simply respecting our bathrooms and using them for their intended purposes, could be yet another thing we can take pride in about our school.
