Eau de P.E.

Let’s say you are the type of student in high school who loves physical education. It’s your favorite class.

Despite this making you a minority on the planet Teenville, you also love the uniforms. Love running around the track, vaulting hurdles, swimming laps, sweating through . . . ahhh, there. There’s that one thing about P.E. you probably hate, like every teenager before and after you: the dreaded communal shower.

Some things about P.E. never change. But as the 1996 fall semester unfolds, it is clear one thing has: Few students shower at school anymore.

Not after P.E. Not after a two-hour round of competitive basketball. Not after a stinky, sweaty football game.

Venice High School Athletic Director John Galbraith thinks the decline of student showering lies largely in its optional status. “It used to be absolutely mandatory. You had some old guy named Pops handing out towels and making sure students showered. Supervision is way down and P.E. class is only mandatory two out of four years in high school.”

“I can’t remember the last time I saw a kid take a shower,” says Dan Miller, veteran athletic director at Anaheim High School.

A few years ago, Anaheim’s football coach, Allen Carter, made the team shower. Miller entered the locker room and heard gushing water. He was alarmed. What was going on? Did he have a plumbing leak on his hands?

“I remember being shocked,” Miller adds, laughing, “to actually find kids there.”

There is no code governing school showers, according to the California Department of Education. But the prevailing view among public educators is that it’s no longer appropriate to require students to take showers. Teachers are more sensitive to charges of harassment. Students are more likely to claim--and be granted--a right to some privacy.

In December 1994, a Pennsylvania school district dropped its showering requirement after the American Civil Liberties Union threatened to sue on behalf of a teenage girl. The ACLU argued that a student’s right to privacy is violated if he or she is forced to be naked before classmates.

According to a Los Angeles Unified School District spokesman, the shower policy can vary from school to school. “No one can remember a written policy addressing it,” says LAUSD spokeswoman Shel Erlich. “It is very difficult to monitor whether or not a child showers, but school principals do encourage kids to shower. More teens are not showering partly because of an inability to monitor showering and partly because kids during the teenage years don’t care to have themselves seen without clothes on.”

And then there’s the matter of towels.

Schools gradually stopped providing towels and laundering as they looked for ways to save money after Proposition 13 led to reduced property tax revenue for schools. Students cannot be charged separately for them because the state bans public schools from levying fees connected with required courses.

P.E. instructors and coaches say they still preach the virtues of hygiene and encourage showering. But given the choice, a majority of students don’t. This new reality has emerged around the country, according to the National Assn. for Sport and Physical Education.

So seldom are the showers used in some middle school student locker rooms that campus furniture is stored there. Occasionally, the showers don’t work. If they do work, there may not always be hot water available.

Budgets are so tight that a few schools figure it’s wasteful to repair plumbing or hot water tanks for showers that are rarely used.

San Fernando High School English teacher and football coach Robert Garcia attributes the aversion to showers to both modesty and the towel shortage. “Maybe 10% out of a class of 50 kids take showers. Embarrassment may be one cause, but the main reason is a lot of schools don’t have the budget for laundering towels. Most of the kids go in and wet their T-shirt and wipe under their arms so that by the fifth period they are hummin’ [with body odor]. Some kids bring their own towels so they can shower, leaving them to dry overnight.”

But Jeanette Carrera, a San Fernando High School 10th-grader, says that while most of her friends claim to skip showers because of modesty, she refrains because of a time crunch. “You only have 10 minutes after P.E. and that just isn’t enough time.”

Towels are one problem at John Adams Middle School in Santa Monica, where P.E. teacher Dorothy Palmer says: “After Proposition 13 passed, we lost the money for laundering towels. We tell the kids they can shower if they bring their own towels and don’t leave them in their lockers where they mildew. Initially, all sixth-graders want to do is dress and take showers, then they don’t do it anymore. We can’t require them to take showers because we don’t have towels. Probably 1% of kids shower, although we do encourage it.”

Showers in the boys’ half of the gym at John Adams were used so infrequently, the school started using the space for storing athletic equipment.

But not all students are content to traipse through classes in a state of stench. “I stink like crazy in my sixth class,” says John Adams student Glenn Bolan, 13. “I’d like to take a shower but they aren’t functional.”

Even after competition, few athletes shower at school--their own or the opposing team’s, many coaches say.

The basketball team at Corona del Mar High School finishes a game and--perspiring or not--dons sweats and rides the bus back to campus. Then players go home to shower, Coach Paul Orrisc says.

“It’s interesting,” an Anaheim father says. “I guess we have whole schools of kids walking around campus all day like sweaty little pigs.”

Tony Chretin, P.E. department chairman and varsity football coach at Venice High School, says that the shower-phobic trend isn’t new. “In the last 10 years, almost no one showers. Embarrassment is part of it. Our football guys go in there with their girdles and pads on to shower. Most of them just put on deodorant and go to their parties. We finally stopped handing out towels here.”

One boy from Edison High School in Huntington Beach says he is torn about showering or not after P.E. class.

Interviewed at Westminster Mall while shopping for back-to-school wear, the youth insisted on talking some distance from the food court, a magnet for teenagers promenading the tables to check out and be checked out. P.E. can be such a sensitive subject.

The 15-year-old, who’s tall and skinny, says he subjects himself to mockery if he takes a shower in front of other boys. “I have P.E. second period, so I have to like load on the Right Guard and hope it lasts me,” says the teen, who asked that his name not be used. “Don’t even say what color hair I have. I’m sort of a geek anyway, so I don’t need any more hassles.”

Teachers say young people of every generation have fears about their physique measuring up to their peers’. Requiring students to shower, some teachers and P.E. experts say, can be extremely counterproductive.

Pressuring unnerved youths to enter a situation fraught with potential embarrassment does not serve the larger aim behind the 2-year-old statewide program to recondition public school P.E. programs. The goal ultimately is to inspire interest in fitness and teach skills that will serve students for the rest of their lives.

Jeanne Bartelt, the state Department of Education’s physical education consultant and a former high school and college P.E. teacher, says, “I was scared and self-conscious at that age. Even in the Marine Corps. I discovered that even if I got up at 4 a.m. to shower in private, there was someone else up at 3 doing the same thing.

“If you’re a good teacher, and paying attention to your kids,” she says, “you can tell if modesty” or fear of disrobing in the communal locker room is preventing a student from participating in P.E.

Brent Ellis, a sophomore at Westminster High School, is goalie for the varsity water polo team. He and his teammates are exceptions. They actually shower.

But not in the nude.

“All the guys I know shower in swimsuits,” Ellis says. “I have never seen anyone shower at school in the nude.”

At Aliso Niguel High, just 4 years old, showers have teal and beige tile and individual temperature controls, says Alma Ming, manager of the girls’ locker room. Perhaps because it’s more inviting, she says, a lot of the kids shower, even if they lather up in their swimsuits and they use their towels to cover up.

“We call it changing surfer style,” Ming says. In the style of surfers who often put their swimsuits on in the beach parking lot, the students wrap towels around themselves and shimmy clothes on and off beneath it.

* Freelance writer Kathleen Kelleher contributed to this story.