It’s 9 am and you just finished your Marylou’s Red Bull. You sign out to head to the bathroom and grab the hall pass. This should be simple, but you may need luck on that journey. The bathrooms at the end of the hallways at the back of the school on all three floors are currently out of order.
“We have a large pipe that’s on the bottom floor that has broken,” explained principal Keuther. “We have to open up the bathroom floor and find the section of the pipe that’s broken. It has to be done while students are not inside the building, so the work will be done on Saturdays and we are in the process of completing that work as soon as we possibly can.”
Unfortunately, the bathrooms cannot open back up until the pipe is replaced, so for now, bathroom options are limited. The only girls’ bathroom on the second floor that is open is in the art wing. English teacher Ms. Murphy’s classroom is at the end of the hall on the second floor, across the building from this working bathroom.
“This is not sustainable. I don’t have a bathroom I can access during classes and get back to in time, nor do students have a bathroom they can get back from in a timely fashion,” expressed Ms. Murphy.
With very few working bathrooms, a time problem arises. The stress that comes with bathroom inaccessibility is taking a mental toll on everyone in the building.
“Students are out of class for 10 minutes at a time waiting in lines to use the one working bathroom on their floor,” says student representative Ruby Maggio. “[Students] have withheld their need to leave for fear of being reprimanded for the time out of class or missing instruction, which not only distracts them from learning but is physically unfair.”
