Lockdowns: Bathroom Edition

Emily Orbovich, Grade 11

Any CAPA student knows the feeling of rushing to the bathroom during a class on the second floor. The floor’s unique layout makes the walk from your class to the bathroom excruciatingly long. When you finally reach the bathroom door, you push on it, ready for relief in the privacy of a charcoal-colored stall…but the door is locked. 

In the last two years at CAPA, bathrooms around the school have been locked more often, especially on the second floor. These unpredictable bathroom lockings are an extreme inconvenience to students and administrators.

As to why bathrooms are being locked, the main reason is student behavior. Issues like some students skipping class or vaping inside stalls. The entire school is being punished while only some are actually contributing to these issues. Locking the second-floor bathroom does not diminish negative behavior, it just changes its location. This is a lazy attempt at stopping an issue that should be addressed at the root.

If bathrooms are locked, students will just go to other floors, and find different nooks and crannies of CAPA, which only furthers the skipping problem.

Personally, I’ve been stopped many times on each high school floor by teachers who thought I was skipping class when really I was just using the bathroom. Additionally, teachers overwhelmingly question me when I am just trying to explain the overcrowding of girls in the third-floor bathrooms that held me up from getting a stall.

“It makes me mad because then I have to take a long time walking around to a bathroom instead of doing my work,” says Sage Link, an 11th-grade literary artist. This is a big issue because instead of maximizing learning time, students have to scour the school trying to find an accessible bathroom.

“Students who are truly trying to use the bathroom have very limited options and are often forced to use the same bathrooms where students are vaping and smoking,” says shsroundtable.com, on the subject of administration locking bathrooms. This article says just it; locking bathrooms narrows bad problems into a smaller space, which in return just makes everyone more uncomfortable.

Punishing the whole student body for problems that they are not causing is unjust. Many other solutions could benefit both teachers, students, and the entire school. We could write passes with full names on them so that if students are caught, their first and last names can be properly written up or easily used to take a more proactive approach. Another offer: if a large group of students are going into the bathroom, a teacher may monitor them appropriately to ensure no roughhousing or irresponsible activity. All in all, not every student who uses school restrooms is misbehaving in them, so the entire student body shouldn’t be receiving punishments for problems only certain students create.