After going around to the girls, boys, and gender non-binary bathrooms, we learned about a lot of problems involving the limited number of bathrooms, bathroom conditions, and the comparison of the student and teacher bathrooms. This brings us to how Waltham High School should be keeping up with the bathrooms and creating a sanitary and safe environment for their students, not just staff. 

Availability of The Girl’s Bathrooms

The bathrooms are unreasonably hard to access; during school hours using the restroom can be an issue, either the conditions of the restroom or people occupying them. When it comes to Waltham High School, bathrooms are never available. The school has kept in place this policy of locking the restrooms due to physical vandalism. This causes bathroom trips during class to be 20 minutes when they could be 5 minutes. You have to go looking for an open bathroom. This is hard to track and has become a very big issue for years. Another reason why they close the bathrooms is because of vaping. This comes hand-in-hand with vandalism and property damage. A way to keep this under control is to keep monitors in the restroom that can detect smoke or nicotine. This is a solution that keeps all students safe and the restrooms open and free during school hours. 

Students and Teacher Perspective of The Restrooms 

After going around Waltham High School and collecting student’s opinions on the restrooms, we found that most students believe the restrooms are unsanitary. The first person to be asked was Brooke L, She is in 9th grade. When asked what was wrong with the restrooms. She stated, “They’re gross and broken.”  To add on with information we also questioned her ideas to change the bathrooms. Brooke replied, “To fix the broken stalls.” Other students requested to get more stalls and to add an air freshener into the restrooms. This evidence shows that our students are uncomfortable with the sanitation in the bathrooms. They mostly suggested changing them in order to upgrade the restrooms. We also got to interview a staff member that works in the front office. We asked, “How do you feel about the bathroom situation in this school?” She told us, “I think the bathrooms should be open more often,” Next we asked her what she would do to improve the bathrooms? She replied, “I wish I knew the answer to that one, it’s been a problem since I went to high school.” Then she went on to say the bathrooms used to be used by students to smoke in them, but they were still always open. Waltham High needs to take this into consideration and keep their students and staff feel comfortable and safe. 

Boys Bathroom Conditions

Another thing we looked at was the boy’s bathrooms and we learned they are unreasonably filthy. There are walls covered in urine, there is human excrement in the urinals, and in some rare cases, it is even smeared onto the walls (not very fair for custodians). None of the stall doors can be locked or even closed. The sinks sometimes are just not there because the handles to turn it on are gone, and the whole bathroom is sadly a big mess. This general disarray of the bathrooms discourages kids from actually going to the bathroom to use it for what it is made for. This makes the bathrooms become more of a place to mess around and skip class.

Overall we are not happy with what we found in the student bathrooms, and people of this school weren’t either. From their opinions, we need to improve bathroom conditions, bathroom comfortability, and general bathroom availability. We need to take accountability and with student and staff ideas, we could update the bathrooms.