No Rest for Restrooms

In the bathrooms at Academy for Young Writers, many students use scrunchies to close the doors. Students need to hold the doors for others so they don’t fly open. Students even bring their own hand sanitizer because of the lack of soap and paper towels.

There has been a growing issue regarding how the school is not fixing the girl’s and boy’s bathrooms. 

This issue, which started at the beginning of the school year, has gotten so bad  to the point where students have started to complain to teachers and staff about how the bathrooms are not usable. Staff are aware, but the school has not done anything about the problem.

“I don’t know how the school is letting us students use the bathrooms in these conditions.”

In Academy for Young Writers (AFYW) students are allowed to use the bathrooms from the first and fourth floors while the third and second floors are used by another school. 

Some students pointed out that in the girl’s bathrooms on the first floor, stall locks do not work and that they are broken so they have to do DIY in order to have the stalls close. 

“If we don’t have anything on us that can help us close the stall me and my friend have to help each other out by holding the stall door close for each other”.

It is said that if someone goes to the bathroom by themselves on the first floor alone only two stalls work only because the other stall locks would be completely broken. They would have to use the stall that can lock without having to tie it with a hair tie or something else. The girl’s stalls not being able to close is one thing but sometimes the bathroom floods so some of the stalls would be out of order. If we estimate that only around two stalls would work on just one floor alone and this causes the students to be infuriated because they want to use the bathroom but they can’t because someone else would be using it. 

Another problem that the bathroom for girls and boys is that there is barely soap for students to use after they finished using the bathrooms. So when the students finish using that bathroom they have nothing but water to wash their hands. This comes to our third problem that the bathrooms run out of paper quickly. But the staff doesn’t put more until the next day which gets the students frustrated because the school is not doing anything about it. 

Teacher’s Response

Teachers in every grade have come to say that the only reason the bathroom is the way they are is because the students make it that way. But we don’t know whether that is true or not. 

“Every time we send a student to the bathroom they always take a long time to get back to class. But we can see what they are doing, playing and fooling around with their friends.” 

They have stated that the reason the locks of the bathroom are broken and don’t work is that the students be playing around in the stalls and which is the reason they take their time to get back to class.

Student’s Response

Students believe that the reason why the school is not doing anything about the bathroom is that they are too busy wasting money on phone pockets so the students wouldn’t be able to use their phones during class. 

“I don’t know why the school is wasting their money on useless things like phone pockets when they know it’s not going to work because we still going to use our phones during class.” 

This problem grew to the point where students in different grades stated whether the school is doing the right thing.