[dropcap]I[/dropcap] don’t know about you, but when I have to go to the bathroom at school, I find myself weighing my options.
Option 1: I could adhere to the calls of nature while undergoing an unpleasant experience. Option 2: I am forced to wait (sometimes a long time), but have the luxury of using a bathroom facility dignified for human use.
Yeah, it sounds dramatic, but most of the time I end up choosing Option 2. Why?
I’m going to try to keep this to a minimum level of grossness while illustrating what a typical encounter with the girls bathroom looks like.
One of the first things you notice is the trash on the floor. Considering all problem areas, I’d say this is the most understandable. Maybe you went to the bathroom with only a one minute left until the bell, and your aim just wasn’t so great. All right. That’s fine. But even if you only had 2 seconds left….there is no excuse for this next mistake I see in at least one stall, once a day. It can be expressed in just one word:
Flush!
I don’t think I will ever comprehend the type of person who just forgets or decides not to flush the toilet. Now that we have advanced plumbing (that’s right, no more primitive outhouses), there is absolutely no reason the average person couldn’t push down a lever to keep a cleaner environment. It smells awful, it looks bad, and it makes everyone feel uncomfortable.
In fact, one of the most annoying bathroom experiences happens when, upon entering the bathroom, I’m greeted by a long line of girls, but then see that there are one or two stalls open. Confused, I always walk up to these stalls (it’s always the same), only to discover they aren’t in use because the previous user didn’t flush. Usually after that, an awkward, wrinkled-nose expression is shared with a few of the girls in line. Then, thoroughly disgusted, I saunter back to the end of the line. Do your parents let you get away with not flushing? Aren’t you embarrassed? I’m embarrassed for you.
Keep in mind, these are girls, creatures who are known for their avid grooming and impeccable hygiene. I shudder to think how the boys maintain their bathrooms.
Next, I see enough personal garbage on my Facebook newsfeed, on my Twitterfeed, and even in day-to-day gossip. Why do girls insist on making stall doors their personal ads? Here are a few I’ve seen:
“I hate school”
“Any bi/lez girls want to text?”
Surely, with today’s technology, there must be a better medium to express yourself and your thoughts than in a bathroom stall. These could easily be Facebook statuses. Is it necessary to deface a part of our school just because you want people to read your personal messages?
Lately, I’ve been pondering the question of health levels at school. Funnily enough, the condition of our bathrooms was one of the first things that came to mind. Bathrooms, germy enough in themselves, are frighteningly unhealthy at schools. In the mid-90s, a Georgia man named Tom Keating created a program called Project CLEAN (Citizens, Learners, Educators Against Neglect) in which he traveled across the country lecturing schools and, in the earlier years of his program, cleaning up bathrooms. According to him, nearly one third of over 900,000 American public school bathrooms are unclean, unhealthy, unsafe, or a combination. Seeing the state of our bathrooms every day brings me to the sad conclusion that we are a statistic in this count.
On page 4 you can see, Newsweek ranked us No. 1,595 out of 24,348 in the nation. Clearly, no judges ever came to Shawnee Mission South after drinking a full bottle of water. Had they been forced to enter one of our pigsty bathrooms, I feel like they would have had to rescind their recognition. How can privileged Johnson County students with good manners and high test scores surround themselves with restrooms the likes of which I’ve never even seen in the third world? What does it say about us?
Maybe you’ve already thought about this, but isn’t that why we have janitors? I don’t know. Do you want to hold someone else accountable for your inability to clean up after yourself? Janitors, who are there primarily to monitor things like plumbing, functionality and emptying trash cans should not have to deal with some of the things thrown at them, not from kids in our age group. We should have the common courtesy to consider the maintenance staff in our bathroom habits.
On good days, I like to think that our student body is a mature, conscientious group of people. However, my bathroom encounters tend to inhibit this view. If we are proud of our school, why do we choose to treat it this way? I’m sure most would agree they would not want their home bathrooms to look like ours.
