Our Turn Hit or Miss School day disrupted by drug usage in bathroom

Eliana Grant | Reporter

If you have been a high school student long enough, no doubt you have noticed the increasing precautions schools take to prevent teens from smoking in the bathrooms. They use a solid mixture between locking doors completely to propping them open, two sides of the same coin which seem to have little to no effect on actual students besides making them try to find a completely different bathroom if it is locked. This I can attest to has been a major inconvenience for myself and other students, for seemingly little actual prevention of drug use.

As most teens have point you may walk into rooms and take of vapes or marijuana, or groups of teens sitting around glaring at you for walking in on them. For me, this has happened more times than I can count. It’s always the walk into a walk past the and there at the end bathroom around the handicapped accessible stall is a group of teenagers judgmentally glaring at you for daring to interrupt them for just wanting to use the bathroom.

While this is uncomfortable but common experience, it is generally a more positive thing to walk in and see rather than the door and realize it is locked. This creates an incredible negative in your day. Going all throughout the school just to find a door that’s open is inconvenient for students, and while it may prevent smoking, it also prevents easy rest room usage, something which everyone should be entitled to.

On the other hand, the bathroom door is also often fixed open, reducing your feelings of privacy and safety as you go to the bathroom while everyone outside of it can hear and smell everything that occurs, which I believe most teens can agree is less than favorable. In these instances I have heard of students either going to find a different bathroom, which creates the same problem as having it locked, or they actually use the rest room with incredible anxiety as to what people passing by may possibly hear or even that they may look inside. This is a clear violation of privacy for the student body and is all caused by the school trying to

Barren classrooms cause concern for student content

prevent students from smoking.

The most unfortunate thing I have been subject to, however, was during a lunch period in my freshman year. I had gotten up from my lunch table to go to the rest room, and when I walked in it was immediately noticeable that kids had been vaping. The sickening sweet smell mixed with a putrid smokey odor disturbed me, but I carried on and went into a stall. Right before I was about to exit the stall, however, I heard a female teacher’s voice yelling into the rest room asking if someone was vaping, and proceeding to order everyone out of the bathroom. I barely myself together and wash my hands lined everyone up against the as we got to watch everyone, including my friends, walk past and whisper asking what was going on. We were taken into G hall and lined up, then taken into a room with two security guards, where they inspected our bags and separated us from the group if we had vapes.

I didn’t have a vape, and was able to continue on my way to class, however this is a very clear example of the annoyance and hassle that kids smoking in rest rooms puts other students into. The irritation of walking into a bathroom with people smoking not only comes from the smell, or being glared at by others, but also from the fear that if these kids are caught, you will also be taken and inspected, creating an overall messy ordeal for everyone involved who simply needed to use the bathroom.

In the end, students smoking in the bathroom, a well as the ineffective ways that the school goes about trying to prevent this is incredibly inconvenient and makes an overall unpleasant experience whenever you step out of a classroom to go to the bathroom. I certainly wouldn’t say my experience with the school officers and having my bag checked was awful, or a bad thing overall, but the rampant usage of marijuana and vapes in the bathroom, and how the school deals with that, does create tension and incredible discomfort when you’re just trying to go about your day.

Though students spend most of their lives in them, schools are often compared to prison buildings, and many of these comparisons are not wrong. Many classrooms have an absence of windows, color, comfort, or any sort of identifiable object that brings joy. Though the layout of the school is mostly attributed to building designers, many of the ways rooms are decorated are a result of a lack of focus on making classrooms comfortable for students, teachers, and administrators who have to spend eight or more hours a day in. Many studies have been done on the effectiveness of comfortable classrooms on students’ learning - the more students feel relaxed, the more likely they will be able to focus on schoolwork. A lot of the time, though, students find it difficult to come to school if it feels too much like a foreign environment. Unfortunately, many teachers do not have the money out-of-pocket to spend on beautifying their classrooms. If the district invested more into teachers and administrators being able to make classrooms more comfortable places to learn, schools could gain tremendous amounts of money from an increase in attendance, and maybe an increase in grades and graduation rates.

With no changes, the classrooms that are undecorated and not comfortable in school are a miss.

Locking bathrooms inconveniences students

Smoking in the school grounds is an ongoing problem. There isn’t a single bathroom you can step into without being bombarded by the stench of weed. The school has acknowledged this issue, but the implemented solutions to minimize smoking on school grounds is less helpful than it is annoying. Certain bathrooms are locked during school hours to prevent smoking. In theory, it seems like it could work but it really only serves as a nuisance to students trying to go to the restroom.

Students walk through the halls, bathroom to bathroom, hoping to find an open one. With this, they wind up missing part of class. With regards to smoking, it does nothing to stop it. The few bathrooms that are open become smoking hot spots. Students pack into stalls together, creating a line of students who actually need to use the restroom. While the issues are a product of smokers at school, locking the doors is of no help. Therefore, it is a miss.

Retraction