by Warrior Staff

Principal Eric Minus has made numerous visual improvements to school during his tenure. While his changes have made the school better, the bathrooms demand more attention.

The student bathrooms at Sherwood are filthy. A significant number of the student body refuses to even go in them because of the nasty and vile state they are in. Many of the girls’ bathrooms are falling apart; feminine hygiene products litter the floor, as the trash cans, many of which have fallen off the wall, are full of toilet paper. Some toilets and sinks are unusable, either because students leave garbage in them or the seats are revolting. Even the sinks that are usable often make loud grinding noises. By the end of the school day, toilet paper and soap are sparse, if there’s any left at all.

The boys’ bathrooms are equally as disgusting, if not more. Most soap dispensers are broken and detached from the wall, and some have burn marks all over them. Stalls are cramped and the floor and walls are sticky with dried urine. It is common to find toilets full of excrement and various items such as water bottles, Juul pods, and cigarette packs.

Bathrooms are also a gathering place for students to ditch class and vape. Misbehavior like juuling, selling pods, and selling drugs occur in the bathrooms. Even though the security team tries to put a stop to the misbehavior, there’s only so much they can do without violating students’ privacy. Security guards poke their heads to check on what the students are doing and tell them to go to class, but that is rarely effective.

There are a few simple and easy changes that can be made by both students and staff to improve bathroom conditions. For one, students can be more conscientious about their behavior in the bathrooms, from tasks as uncomplicated as flushing the toilets or throwing away trash to simply refraining from vaping in the bathrooms. Our parents potty-trained us for a reason: it’s about time we stopped behaving like animals. On the staff end, bathrooms can be more frequently updated with supplies like soap and toilet paper that commonly run out before the end of the day. Also, something as simple as adding real trash cans to the bathrooms and toilet seat covers in the stalls would make the overall conditions of the bathrooms cleaner.

More substantial renovations and replacements to bathroom facilities may be expensive but are warranted. Adding dividers to urinals, getting better soap dispensers, and installing motion-activated flush toilets would improve conditions. Although the conditions of the bathroom aren’t ideal, the students are mostly the ones trashing the bathrooms, so they suffer the direct consequences. The minor fixes than can be made quickly and easily can improve the overall state of bathrooms in an effective and cost-efficient way.