Imagine walking into the school bathroom and seeing a student creating something beautiful. That same bathroom has been getting worse and worse each day, but this student has taken time out of the kindness of their own heart to remake a dank and destroyed bathroom enjoyable again. This student is Jasmine Zimmerman.
Students with the passion and the strive to make a difference in their schools should be praised. These students are really what create the backbone to help the bathrooms of a failed population of students who feel the need to destroy and vandalize them. Jasmine Zimmerman is a senior, and she really is showing her maturity by creating a mural on a stall, but fellow students vandalized it.
“It was really upsetting and it kind of made me want to stop completely,” Zimmerman said. “It was really discouraging and I feel like it made me so disappointed in my peers. I was trying to do something better, make it a healthy environment and pretty, and they just wrote a bad word over it. I’m just disappointed.”
Zimmerman is not the only student who feels so deeply about this issue. Senior Emily Sanchez is fed up with going to the foreign language hallway during math because the bathroom is closed.
“Now, if I want to use the bathroom during math, I have to go all the way to the foreign language hallway,” Sanchez said. “The reality is that people aren’t respecting the school and the bathrooms. I don’t really understand why. They are bathrooms. Putting your weight on a sink or destroying a stall, I just don’t understand why because it is vandalism. People are not really respecting the school, or people in general anymore.”
These issues that are plaguing the bathrooms are stopping students like sophomore Veda Fagner, who tries to avoid using the bathrooms as much as possible.
“It is just really gross and not fun to be in there,” Fagner said. “I don’t know if the school can do anything, because I think it’s more just the students. The only reason I don’t like them is because people don’t know how to use the bathrooms, which is really dumb. High schoolers should be able to go in bathrooms without destroying them. I don’t know why we have a problem with it. It is really juvenile.”
Freshman Gracelyn Scott said they are getting more and more disgusting every day. Students like her are tired of the decline of the bathrooms.
“Quality doesn’t always mean quantity,” Scott said. “You can’t let everyone be affected [by closing the bathrooms] by other people’s poor decisions. I think it is ridiculous. Why would you destroy something that is just there for you to use?”
That sentiment, why would you destroy something that is a basic necessity, is shared by many in the school, yet they are still being destroyed by a minority. This ruling by a minority of students needs to end. Why are they controlling the policy around the bathrooms? How can we be so reactant to these students? We need to solve the root of the problem, but how do we do that?
“If we are to be as technologically sound as we are here at LHS, we have a beautiful campus, have beautiful facilities, and need to protect those facilities,” English teacher Jessica Kranz said. “Clearly, right now, we are not. So, if that means installing cameras at the entrance points of the bathrooms so we can monitor, and close them down during passing periods so that they’re only open during certain times. I’m not sure what the answer is.”
An issue that may come up, however, is the legal possibility of putting cameras up at the entrances of the bathrooms. After extensive research, I have come to the conclusion that there is no law that prohibits cameras outside of the restrooms above the door. So, what does this mean? This means that we need to come up with a solution for the bathrooms that don’t prohibit respectful students from using them. Everyone shouldn’t be responsible for the actions of some.
Taking a student’s time for convocations or assembles could seem unimportant or annoying. However, if we were to have an assembly where we were all told how disgraceful it is to destroy a bathroom, maybe things would change. If we wouldn’t treat the bathrooms like a privilege that could be taken away, and instead like a right that we need to protect, maybe people would stop destroying them.
All I am asking is for everyone to do their part. To the students who are destroying them, the students who know someone who has, the administration, I only want my bathroom back. Is that too much to ask for?
