The Implications of Closing Down Bathrooms
February 23, 2018
By Ramzi Maducdoc
After an intense staring contest with the clock, the bell finally rings. You ignore the final words of the teacher and burst out the door, essentially sprinting towards the nearest bathroom you can find.
As your body practically glues itself to the blue door, a cold realization that the bathroom is closed takes over your mind, and you begin the race to find another bathroom.
Zooming past the hallways, grunting “sorry” a few times as you bump into people, you enter the open bathroom only to find the room filled with the stench of nicotine and third hand smoke.
Simply going to the bathroom should not include trials of this degree.
In the latter months of last semester, boy’s bathrooms around the school suddenly started closing with no apparent reason.
Usually, when a bathroom is closed down there is a sign put up with a reason why, the most frequent being vandalism, which is self-explanatory if you have ever been inside a boys’ bathroom on campus.
However, for the bathrooms that were closed down, there were no signs up, no reason given for why they were closed.
This created a severe inconvenience for many male students around campus.
In addition to the already bothersome situation, in the bathrooms that were open, droves of male students would go inside to do drugs, the most common being e-cigarettes.
Although a decision as seemingly harmless as closing down bathrooms may seem harmless, in actuality they create implications that in turn create complications that students are left to endure.
For lack of a better euphemism, when a student needs to do their business they should not have to go halfway around the world just to do it.
And by having to travel such a large distance, there remains a risk that the pupil will get to class late.
To the students who do not want to take the risk of being late to class, they force themselves to “hold it in,” which can cause serious health problems.
According to an article by CBS news, “Bathroom break controversy: Is ‘holding it’ bad for your health?” ignoring the need to go can lead to urine stagnation as well as urinary tract infections. The bladder essentially becomes a nursery for bacteria, which can cause extremely painful kidney stones in harsh cases.
As students attempt to hold in their discomfort, staff refuses to use the key to resolve them.
