Gabrielle Hart
Staff Writer
It started off as once in a while, I assumed it was just a mistake.
Then I saw it at least once on every floor, and I started to become more concerned.
Then it became a common theme on every floor, in every stall.
It was just all around gross.
On the first day of school I was excited to attend a school where I knew people cared about SLA’s environment. But then I encountered the mess of the bathrooms.
I’ve had bad experiences with school bathrooms in the past — and I understand that mistakes happen — but this issue became a routine I saw everyday, in every all-gender bathroom.
Initially, the school sent out an email saying that the automatic flush is not guaranteed to work for every toilet earlier in the school year. It was also stated in the email that it is in everyone’s best interest to use the button on the side of the toilet to ensure that everything goes down the toilet.
Based on how nasty things have been, I will just assume that many people didn’t read that email. Since then every time I walked into the bathroom most stalls would be clogged with toilet paper… along with other things you typically find in a toilet. I would often find myself and at least one other person entering and exiting the bathroom within seconds because of how foul the bathroom stalls were. I can recall many instances where all we could do was laugh with one another in disbelief.
Trash is another issue in these bathrooms. In the handicapped stall there aren’t trash cans to put our used paper towels in. However, there is a huge trashcan next to the door that you simply can not miss when walking out. I began to notice that people would leave their used paper towels sitting on top of the handicap stall sink. After a week or so I realized that many people just took after one person when leaving used paper towels in the stall instead of putting them in the trash. I would find myself using dry paper towels to pick up the soaked used ones and placing them in the cans myself.
Students also leave the sinks covered with water and clogged with paper towels, ramen, or hair in the drains. If one notices that they have created a mess when washing their hands the best thing to do is to grab paper towels and wipe it up instead of leaving it there. It can get really annoying for another person to come into the bathroom to wash their hands and leave with their forearms and elbows soaked in water.
While there are times that messes occur in the bathroom we are still responsible for cleaning up after ourselves.
