Bathroom Vandalization

Thursday, December 16, 2021 The wild west of the boys bathroom

Aidan Shelton

Art Director

Recently, the bathrooms at Arcata High School have devolved into a sad and scary state. The bathrooms feature extreme dirtiness, swarms of vaping kids, and even a stolen sink.

In their current condition, many students don’t use the school bathrooms unless it’s an absolute emergency.

“It’s pretty treacherous, I’m kind of always on guard,” sophomore Alex White said about the bathroom conditions.

After unknown students lit a trash can on fire in the science wing bathroom during the 20192020 school year, the bathroom closed, and has not reopened since then.

The Fine Arts Building bathrooms were formally known as the best bathrooms on the campus for their cleanliness, pristine nature and the fact that they were single stalls.

In a 2017 Pepperbox article that ranked all bathrooms on campus, the FAB bathrooms came in first place.

However, these safe havens for students wanting a clean bathroom experience have been ripped away from the general public, as too many students were using them to perform scandalous activities. Students now need to get a key from the music rooms to use them.

Another clean bathroom, the gym bathrooms, have faced a similar fate.

The bathrooms are usually filled with freshmen and P.E. kids vaping, so they are often locked, making them unreliable for students.

All these closings have caused extra traffic in smaller bathrooms like the Six Rivers bathrooms, which are open most of the time, but have been locked periodically due to the current situation.

Students can expect the worst conditions in the boy’s front bathroom, but it is far from the only bathroom with these problems.

The office bathrooms have had their fair share of shenanigans.

Due to the “devious licks” trend on TikTok, posters about the trend and where to report vandalism have been hung up around the school.

These did not end up being effective because it only brought more attention to the issue, which caused vandalism to occur the day the posters were put up.

“There was a soap dispenser in the toilet in the bathroom by the office,” said sophomore Noah Macknicki.

The office bathroom often has much more mysterious and disgusting incidents, like jam smeared everywhere including the ceiling, the toilet paper being wet and ripped up, and even urine on the floor which is a surprisingly common occurrence.

For safety reasons, I would recommend students only go to this bathroom for quick business trips, with an escape plan in mind.

All these incidents have caused many bathrooms to be closed, some temporarily, some permanently.

This current movement of desecrating the bathrooms has left many students concerned and disappointed in the school.

With only the seniors having been at school in person for a full year, the class feels like it is their duty to show the underclassmen how to use the bathrooms like people and not animals.

As a senior myself, I care about the quality of the bathrooms for the future of our school. We need to think about the freshmen who are coming into the school with a deplorable bathroom environment.

Senior Everett Marsh empathizes with the freshman coming into this new world.

“I would start vomiting if I walked into an environment like this because it is scary, you are nervous when you’re a freshman… It’s just not very welcoming seeing the sink ripped off the wall, it’s just really disgusting,” Marsh said.

While many students are scared of the current state of the bathroom, many still have hope that the conditions can improve.

“The behavior in the bathrooms has not been acceptable to what we have normally had in the past before COVID, for sure, so we just need to get back on track,” Principal Monge stated.

He continued that the TikTok trend specifically has caused the situation to be worse than before.

While more adults will monitor the bathrooms in an attempt to minimize harm, he wants the main help to be in the form of students

“We encourage you guys to be part of the solution as well,” he stated.

Students shouldn’t just have to rely on administrative action. We should be able to hold ourselves and others accountable, not just for our own gain, but for the future of the school.

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