Campus Restrooms: ‘They Stink, They’re Gross’

When Vice President Al Gore came to Ball Junior High in Anaheim in March to talk about plans to spend billions of dollars to upgrade school campuses, the students focused on one aspect of those buildings they found particularly galling.

The restrooms.

One eighth-grader griped about the lack of paper. Another said she had to walk five minutes to the far side of campus--even in the rain--to get to the only restroom left open. A third echoed the first two.

“This seems to be a recurring theme,” Gore drolly noted.

Restrooms may sound like a small point when evaluating the quality of public education in California. But that’s just the point: If educators can’t handle something so basic as keeping restrooms adequately stocked and maintained, how can they be expected to fix more complex problems such as teaching students to read?

And by that fundamental measure, California schools have much room for improvement, a Times poll of middle school and high school students found. Of those surveyed, 48% said they avoid using the restrooms at their school. The reasons? They’re filthy. The toilets don’t flush. The sinks don’t work. There’s no toilet paper and no doors on the stalls.

“If they’re public schools, they’re public bathrooms and they’re trashed,” said 15-year-old Javier Felix, who avoids using the restrooms at his school in Madera. “When anyone thinks of school restrooms, they think of them being in bad shape.”

“They stink, they’re gross,” said Alana Howard, a senior in the Bay Area suburb of Fairfield. “I try to avoid them, like, seriously.”

“Telling the difference between the sink and the urinal is quite a challenge,” said James Douglas, a senior at El Capitan High School in the San Diego County town of Lakeside.

If students consider the restrooms in their schools offensive, educators see them as, inch for inch, the source of some of their biggest headaches.

Part of the problem is that many campuses have far more students than they were built to handle. Although schools add portable classrooms to accommodate overflow students, they can’t usually afford to install more restrooms.

Many of California’s schools are approaching 50 years old and strapped districts have not invested in basic maintenance of pipes and fixtures.

But many of the problems are caused by destructive students.

Students at many campuses take pride in stuffing paper towels into sinks and letting the water run so it overflows. Another trick is to urinate into the toilet paper dispensers, ruining the paper. At Belmont High School, students have burned paper towels.

Many schools simply lock up restrooms they can’t afford to monitor constantly. That was what administrators at Katella High School in Anaheim did after one of two boys bathrooms became a target for graffiti and a hangout for smokers.

Locke High School in South Los Angeles took an additional step to combat vandalism and graffiti. There, only one set of restrooms, down the hall from the principal’s office, is kept open. And students are subjected to the indignity of having to sign in with a monitor every time they have to attend to a private function.

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Los Angeles school officials are fighting restroom problems with technology. Using money from the district’s $2.4-billion bond issue, they are installing “smart” fixtures, costing $7,000 per bathroom, in 17 elementary and middle schools.

The idea is that automatic hand dryers will eliminate paper towels, which then can’t be stuffed into toilets and sinks. Automatic faucets will prevent water from overfilling sinks and covering floors. The district gave up on auto-flush toilets, however, fearing that students would break them. All of that is supposed to free custodians to spend more time on classrooms and hallways while, in the long run, saving money.

To prevent students from disabling hand dryers by squirting water into their motors, officials are installing equipment that they hope is tamper-proof.

At Manual Arts High School, Principal Wendell Greer is trying a different tack--with some success.

When a gang member’s tag is found in a bathroom, Greer gets on the public address system and asks for help in identifying the culprit. Those who have been turned in have been made to clean it up.

He also has made a pact with the students. He has pressured custodians to keep the restrooms stocked and clean. And he promises to buy lunch for any student who finds a restroom that is ill-kept or without toilet paper.

In the girls’ restrooms, he had doors reinstalled to give privacy. And he even puts vases of flowers there on occasion.

It’s a matter of showing mutual respect, he said.