When you first step foot into the busy and bustling environment of VPCI, it can be challenging and intimidating to find your way around. Within the school building there are numerous rooms and locating your specific class can take a large chunk of time you have between classes. With the size of the school in mind, you might think there would be enough functioning bathrooms for students to use. With this assumption, you decide to rush to the bathroom before your next class, yet you find that it’s CLOSED. This is a mistake everyone has made at one point during their VP career, and there are ways to avoid it. This article will provide you with all the information on finding a functioning bathroom at the school and the problems that cause the closures in the first place.
A school environment relies on a steady timetable to function. At VP, our classes begin at 9 am and end promptly at 3:15 pm. With the length of classes being 1 hour and 20 minutes long, there is very little time for students to transition between classes and take breaks. The allocated 5 minutes in between classes is the only time, excluding the lunch break, where students can go to the bathroom outside of class time. The closures of the bathrooms lead to a roadblock in the timetable and force students to find a functioning bathroom, which may be too far to reach in the time before their next class. This causes problems for both students and teachers; students miss valuable instruction time and lessons are disrupted when a student comes in late.
The question you may have in mind is: why are the bathrooms closed in the first place? This question has been asked by everyone, yet students, teachers, as well as administrators don’t have a specific answer. However, there are specific trends concerning the closure of bathrooms and vandalism of the spaces themselves. The main trend noticed by staff and students is the fact that boys and gender neutral bathrooms are the ones facing constant closures. While no one can point at a single reason for the closure of the bathrooms, combined factors of frustrating time during Covid and the supposed “coolness” of vandalism have driven students to damage school property.
The solution towards keeping the bathrooms at school a safe place is a simple one in theory. However, it requires immense amounts of commitment. The first way to keep students from damaging school property can be by making school an environment where students feel safe and comfortable. This way students would be less motivated to vandalize and damage school facilities as they care for them. If the school takes a collaborative approach to tackle this problem, we may have a day where all the bathrooms are open.