• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

SLA Media

SLAMedia is a publication of the news for the Science Leadership Academy community. Writers come from the student body in 10th, 11th, and 12th grades. We work in unison to create a functioning paper with biweekly postings on a variety of events.

  • News
  • Features
  • Sports
  • A&E
  • Op/Ed
  • Multimedia
  • About

Flush, Wash, and Throw Away The Trash

January 21, 2022 by lpahomov Leave a Comment

Gabrielle Hart

Staff Writer

SLA Bathroom. Image by Gabrielle Hart.

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.

Filed Under: Op/Ed

Reader Interactions

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

* Copy This Password *

* Type Or Paste Password Here *

95,344 Spam Comments Blocked so far by Spam Free Wordpress

Primary Sidebar

FacebookInstagramTwitter Snapchat

Features

Wardrobe of SLA

By Harper Leary Staff Writer Philadelphia is a diverse city, and the student population of Science Leadership Academy reflects that fact— not just with their identities, but also with their fashion choices. If you walk down the hallways of SLA, your head will turn every which way to get a glimpse of all the different […]

How the Pandemic has Changed Live Events

By Maya Smelser & Anouk Ghosh-Poulshock Staff Writers Everyone remembers their first concert. But when the pandemic hit, many tours were canceled or rescheduled. There was a hiatus from live music as people adjusted to their new lives– so many teens missed out on their early concert experiences..  In the past few months, however, concerts […]

How Are SLA Students Are Dealing With Their Last Quarter?

Leticia Desouza Staff Writer After a long yet quick year at SLA, students from different grades have experienced many new things they weren’t able to experience during the 2020-2021 online academic year. After almost 10 months of being back in school, students have encountered difficulties and new experiences that further molded how the rest of […]

Philadelphia High Schools Now Starting At 9am

Lia Dunakin Staff Writer The School District of Philadelphia recently announced that all Philly high schools will start their instructional day at 9AM beginning in the 2022-2023 school year.  The reason given for this huge change is simply, sleep. Teenagers tend to get tired later  at night, and starting school at early hours can be […]

Shared Facilities: SLA, and Benjamin Franklin High School Encounters

Andre Doyle, Cameron Booker, & Leticia Desouza Staff Writers SLA and Ben Franklin began their co-location in the Fall of 2019 — but only this year have the two schools started to truly operate in the same space.  Not all of the facilities are used by both schools — most academic spaces are entirely separate. […]

Copyright © 2022 · Metro Pro on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in