The use of a restroom is a fundamental human right, and one that Patchouge-Medford high school consistently fails to provide. Between being publicly shamed by teachers and bathroom-attendants for their requests to use the restroom, and being timed during restroom breaks on public sign in sheets, students are discouraged at every point from feeling comfortable in the school restrooms.

This year, the bathroom system has gotten even worse with the closing of the library-adjacent bathrooms. On the first floor, students take an average of seven minutes* to walk to and from the available bathrooms, not including the time they spend signing in, using the bathroom, and asking for permission to go. This is ridiculous. Students are often encouraged by teachers to wait until their trip to the bathroom is ‘an emergency’ and at this point, they are forced to walk all the way across the school before they can use the restroom.

Furthermore, with this year’s elimination of the communal pass system that allowed students to simply take their classroom pass and go, teachers are now required to hand write passes, which takes up class time, and often leads to teachers refusing to write out passes during their classes, suggesting that students wait until before or after their lessons, which can last upwards of half an hour. 

Of course, teachers and administrators are not subjected to this bathroom scarcity, as their private bathrooms are located readily around the school. Because of this, they may be unaware of the plight of students, especially those with classes on the first floor. 

Reopening the library-adjacent bathrooms will allow students to spend more time engaged in class, and less time walking to and from the bathrooms. It will also eliminate the amount of congestion in the hallways, which the administration is so often trying to decrease. 

Also, the reinstating of classroom passes will allow for a faster, less disruptive bathroom system. It is nearly impossible to catch COVID-19 from touching a surface.

Dean Blumberg, MD, chief of pediatric infectious diseases at UC Davis Children's Hospital commented on the concern that surfaces could spread COVID saying: "You'd need a unique sequence of events," he says. First, someone would need to get a large enough amount of the virus on a surface to cause infection. Then, the virus would need to survive long enough for you to touch that surface and get some on your hands. Then, without washing your hands, you'd have to touch your eyes, nose, or mouth.” Placing a bottle of hand sanitizer next to the pass and telling students to use it before touching it would eliminate this risk all together, also, students would wash their hands in the bathroom, so the pass would be cleaner than most communal classroom items. https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/20200903/coronavirus-on-surfaces-whats-the-real-risk 

TL;DR: It takes way too long to walk from most first floor classrooms to the science hallway bathroom and they should reopen the ones by the library that they closed this year. Also, they should start using communal classroom passes again so you don’t have to ask your teacher to write one. 

*this number is based on practical estimations from multiple students over the course of one week.