Hold It Right There, Missy! Until 3:30

It may have drawn a chuckle in some quarters, the announcement of the latest weapon in L.A. Unified’s school improvement arsenal: a district initiative to keep campus bathrooms clean.

But it’s not so funny if you’re the kid holding it all day, through math class and English and history and P.E. . . . because your school’s bathrooms are so dirty, they scare you.

In fact, this may be the best thing new district CEO Howard Miller has done in his fledgling campaign to shore up the city’s struggling public school system.

In case you missed it, Miller declared last week that because “clean, working restrooms are fundamental” to a good education, the school district is launching a campaign--complete with hotline and bathroom monitors--to keep its 5,800 restrooms clean.

The monitors will work at schools in the South Gate area for now, visiting restrooms several times a day, to make sure they are clean, functional and well-stocked.

The hotline will operate districtwide to register complaints about cleanliness, vandalism or absent supplies.

“Out of Soap?” the campaign poster reads. Call the Clean Restroom Hotline at (800) 495-1191. Each call will generate “a follow-up and . . . a written report within three days,” Miller says.

Well intended, maybe, but a classic case of too little, too late.

I imagine a student perched on a toilet seat, dialing for help from his cellular phone. A written report won’t do him much good. . . . And three days is a long time to wait for a roll of toilet paper.

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It would not be much of an exaggeration to say dirty bathrooms colored my decision to pull my oldest daughter out of our local public school.

Her teachers were great, her classmates were nice, the school was three blocks from our home. But my second-grader came home with a stomachache each day because she was afraid to use the bathroom at school.

It was dark and smelly, and the doors to the stalls didn’t lock. The floor was always wet or littered with dead cockroaches. There was no soap or toilet paper.

“I’d rather just hold it,” she’d say, as she burst through the door each afternoon, clutching her stomach and making a beeline for the sanctuary of our bathroom.

What if, I once asked the principal--only half facetiously--I organized a brigade of parents to visit the restrooms every day, armed with scrub brushes and bottles of bleach? It was a price we would be willing to pay to keep our children’s bathrooms clean.

But he chuckled nervously and turned me down, muttering something about regulations and bureaucracy.

Part of the problem is that the city’s campuses are functioning on perpetual overload, housing thousands more students than they were originally built to hold. And the district is living with the legacy of the deep cuts made in its maintenance budget during lean years a decade ago.

It’s not the fault of school custodians, who make the rounds of restrooms each day, unplugging sinks, replacing paper towels, scraping wads of mushy toilet paper from the floor. Indeed, the havoc wreaked by destructive students could undo even the most ambitious cleanup campaign.

At my daughter’s school, kids thought it was funny to stuff the sinks with paper towels, then run water until they overflowed. Or wad up wet toilet tissue and toss the lumps up to the ceiling, where they would stick until they dried, then fall on some unsuspecting classmate’s head.

And on middle and high school campuses, students have been known to urinate into toilet paper dispensers or set fire to piles of paper towels.

“We try to stay ahead of the game,” says Wendell Greer, principal of Manual Arts High school, which launched its own clean bathroom campaign two years ago. “We put doors on the stalls, keep them stocked [with supplies], clean them after nutrition and lunch. But I also tell the kids, ‘It’s your home, and it’s up to you to keep it clean.’ Sometimes it works, and sometimes you walk in there and it looks like Dodger Stadium after a game.”

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It may seem like a trivial issue in a district that has too few textbooks, not enough teachers, too many campuses built on toxic dump sites.

But a poll of California schoolchildren makes it clear that the bathroom problem is no small concern. In fact, half the students in the state’s public schools say they avoid using their campus restrooms because the facilities are dirty or in disrepair.

Here in L.A., the district has spent almost $1 million revamping restrooms on a handful of campuses--installing automatic hand dryers and faucets, to prevent stuffed-sink overflows. But it would cost more than $20 million to upgrade them at every school.

And there will always be some pint-sized joker whose idea of a math lesson is figuring out how much tissue it takes to plug up a toilet or how long it takes a sink to fill and overflow.

Sandy Banks’ column is published on Sundays and Tuesdays. Her e-mail address is sandy.banks@latimes.com.