As soon as the bell rings for lunch, I rush to the nearest bathroom, hoping to get ahead of the others that need to pee. The girls’ bathrooms at Westmont are notorious for having long lines, especially during mealtimes. With over 1,500 students on campus, it seems only logical that the school should have more than just 10 women stalls. While waiting in line, you can often smell weed or strange other scents drifting from the stalls. Because of the wait, it is sometimes difficult to get to class on time and many teachers’ policies on bathroom use during class are strict. Some only allow students to use the restroom once or twice per semester, and they track every visit. Students are also assigned to specific colored bathrooms, either red or yellow, depending on which class they’re in. Many complain that this policy is illogical and just inconvenient because their assigned bathroom isn’t always the closest one to the classrooms.
While our school clearly has bathroom problems, they are not unique to Westmont. In schools all across the country, bathrooms have provided a safe haven to high school “stoners” and chronic class ditchers. They have become hotspots for not just potty breaks, but for other activities, such as prank playing, bullying, and even bathroom concerts. In an effort to be more inclusive for the LGBTQ community, many schools have also introduced gender-neutral bathrooms, but unfortunately this has just led to more trouble, as students misused the space in ways that administrators couldn’t control.
At Westmont, administrators have attempted to address bathroom issues by monitoring them during lunch and break. While an adult’s presence may scare off some kids, it’s impossible for administrators to oversee everything happening inside the stalls. The school has invested in expensive vape detectors, but these devices are not useful enough to pinpoint and hold accountable exactly who was vaping. In some other schools, excessive measures are taken and security guards now escort students to the bathroom every time they need to go. Undeniably though, schools have “legal and ethical obligations to ensure the safety and well being of their students” and in unsupervised areas like the bathroom it is extremely important that they do so. While bathroom restrictions are certainly important to, they often come at the expense of students who do follow the rules. Students who use the bathroom for its intended purpose should not have to suffer from the consequences of others’ actions. We should individually be trusted with bathroom privileges unless we’ve given administrators a reason not to be. While there’s no easy fix to these problems, it’s clear that the bathroom policies need to be reformed. Students deserve access to clean, functional bathrooms, and schools must find a way to balance trust with security to ensure a respectful and safe environment for everyone.