With each tap of your foot, you feel your heart rate increase. At the same time, a familiar feeling of discomfort washes over you, removing your ability to sit still. You need to relieve yourself, and quickly. After practically running out of class, you find the closest bathroom locked, and the next filled with students, along with the stench of piss that emanates from every surface. The dozens of interrogative eyes lead you to a third, and final bathroom. This all-access restroom provides the privacy you desire. 

The issues of where to relieve oneself are faced by many students daily. The most recent bathroom update at SRHS was in the STEM building, leaving many of the other restrooms lacking comparatively. Alongside the stem bathrooms, there are a few all-access restrooms throughout the school, many of which came from repurposed rooms. 

Although the stigma around school bathrooms has been around for decades, its lengthy lifetime does not give it merit. Coming into high school, I received warnings about certain bathrooms on campus. While they weren’t monumental, they align with the sentiment shared by the current student body: that they are subpar.

Subpar is the nicest way to put it, with the mention of cleanliness, functionality, and crowding being mentioned by nearly everyone whom I’ve spoken to about this. My solution to this would be to turn every restroom into an all-accessible one.

Jason Chang, a senior at SR, said, “It’s dirty. Everything’s broken, and like half the sinks are filled with nasty stuff… the all gender ones, like some of them are okay.” In my time at SR, I’ve seen all of the above and more. There have been multiple instances where the seat covers, or toilet paper, are everywhere, practically making the bathrooms unusable, unless you need to pee in the wide-open urinals. There have been toilets clogged with a pile of toilet paper a foot out of the bowl itself, which gave off a smell like no other. I’ve also received multiple accounts of used menstrual products just lying around the women’s restroom.

I’m sure these issues are addressed daily, but that does not stop them from happening one class period into the day. I believe that students are less likely to trash a solo bathroom if there’s no one there to laugh at their “jokes.” I’ve seen this firsthand, as, apart from an empty bag of chips every once in a while, the all-access bathrooms are usually cleaner and better stocked.

Smokers also plague the gendered bathrooms, as they often group up within causing a ruckus. “I’d say like 60 to 70 percent,” is what Jason said when asked how often he’s found people using the bathroom for non-bathroom activities. Setting aside the obvious health concerns, these groups take up most of the bathroom space and have likely been the cause of the recent fire alarm activity. 

Having each restroom be all-accessible and solo would likely reduce the group hangouts, as well as improve the effectiveness of vape/smoke detectors.

Simply having a designated area for these bathrooms would allow administration to monitor who goes where. Paired with working vape/smoke detectors, it would significantly reduce the in-school smoking whilst also reducing the stigma around bathrooms, especially for a school heavily associated with weed and “420.”

While privacy concerns are valid, a camera would only need to be used when a detector goes off, and I would like to present the point that most gendered bathrooms already have little privacy, with the huge gaps in the stalls and the locks that might as well not be there.

“Each stall has gaps, and I feel uncomfortable because I’m scared someone’s looking,” said Lula Leopard, a senior at SR. Using the bathroom, especially in a public place, leaves you feeling vulnerable, as you are. Animals often feel at higher risk of attack when relieving themselves, and we’re the same. Even though the risk of predators is a lot less likely in our world, it’s still very much possible, even if the “predator” is often just social humiliation.

The large windows into the stalls do not present themselves as safe spaces, and combined with the often broken locks, can result in real dangers to students. These two issues are a very large concern among the student body, but it’s what they’ve come to know as normal. While I can’t account for schools across the country, I don’t doubt this “norm” shows up often.

The gendered STEM bathrooms are a step in the right direction, with lengthy doors and minimal gaps. Even so, there have been some issues with the stall doors closing properly. At the time of writing this, the first stall in the men’s room does not close. “I usually stick to the ones in the Science building, they’re more private,” James Ward, a senior at SR, said. The positive attitude around these bathrooms highlights the need for privacy, and while some may say that simply updating the gendered bathrooms to follow such measures would suffice, the only thing that has over making them all solo, is tradition. Making each bathroom solo, but gendered, has no point; we might as well make them all-accessible, which would promote inclusivity and make students feel more comfortable using bathrooms at school.

Tradition, when prioritized, can hinder progress, and improving schools and student bodies is a big part of societal progression. If schools prioritized students, they would be more willing to learn and feel safer. And while it may seem insignificant, the tradition of gendered bathrooms only damages schools. When getting a general idea of how the student body felt about the bathrooms, I found that none of the negatives were directly related to all-access bathrooms. As such, we can conclude that the stereotype of bad school bathrooms is really only about the gendered ones, and removing the issue entirely would improve the general school climate. 

Jason believes that making each bathroom solo would prolong the time it takes to go to the bathroom and that fewer students would be able to use them. I see where he’s coming from, but I disagree, as the current setup is not optimal, with many bathrooms being unusable. Even if we had fewer restrooms overall, the number of usable bathrooms would increase. Also, the private nature of all accessible bathrooms would give students the ability to reflect on their non-bathroom activities. For example, in a gendered bathroom, students might find fun in throwing paper around, but being by yourself and acting a fool just makes you feel bad; you wouldn’t trash your own bathroom, and the solo bathrooms feel more personal.

I’m aware that the construction of these bathrooms would be expensive, but so would updating the gendered bathrooms just to make them usable. Our school was willing to spend $400,000 on gates around the campus, which aren’t even popular among the students; that likely means we have enough to solve this bathroom issue, something everyone would benefit from. Also, if a school’s priority is to foster a welcoming, comfortable environment that allows kids to learn, money shouldn’t be an issue. With time, I’m sure the all-gendered restrooms I propose would dissolve the stigma around bathroom use, making a natural human process more common than it is now.