At the risk of dating myself: the year is 1975. I’m ducking into the girls’ room across from my ten o’clock algebra class. It’s filled with girls. And cigarette smoke.
Smoking at school was allowed in those days - - outside. Of course it didn’t just stay outside.
I hated it. I hated the smell of the smoke which clung to my clothes and made it hard for me to breathe. I hated competing for the few stalls available when at least one contained someone standing on the toilet seat and burning a message into the ceiling tile with their lit cigarette. It never ceased being a hostile environment to me.
By my senior year they had started locking many of the student restrooms. By that time I had figured out which of the faculty bathrooms I could slip without being caught.
All this is to say that if anyone tells you that kids today are so much worse than back in the day…Are they?
Howard County schools can’t keep up with bathroom vandalism. Their solution? Lock them, Jess Nocera, Baltimore Banner
To be clear: I don’t have first-hand experience with what the school bathroom situation is today. I do know that a big difference between 1975 and today is that the adolescent experience has been warped and distorted by dependence on smart phones and social media. So how does that impact known adolescent behavior? Teens push boundaries. That’s nothing new. They experience changes in hormones that make it difficult to self regulate. They often feel the need to do things to impress the crowd.
Has the combination of normal adolescent ups and downs combined with the addictive nature of social media created something bigger than the sum of its parts? Maybe?
But here’s something else I ponder. If we’re still struggling with school bathroom behavior after all these years then maybe we haven’t been addressing the problem correctly. Are we so busy pulling people out of the river that we never get to the point where we go back see why they keep falling in?
Kids who vandalize school bathrooms could be kids who don’t vandalize school bathrooms if we knew how to unlock the key - - inside of them - - that motivates that behavior. I don’t know the answer but I think it is worth finding out.
Locking bathrooms or adding expensive, high-tech surveillance equipment doesn’t resolve the issue. It’s a reaction. It doesn’t address the root of the problem.
One interesting approach that sparked my curiosity this morning is the suggestion that the fundamental design of school bathrooms strongly contributes to bad outcomes.
Outdated by Design: Why It’s Time to Rethink School Restrooms Once and For All, Kerri Brady, Essentials.Edmarket
Outdated by Design: Imagining School Restroom Safety Through Prevention and Privacy, Kerri Brady, Essentials.Edmarket
Worth a look if you have a minute.
For generations, architects have been invited into conversations about safety only after inevitable harm has occurred — when the task is to repair, rebuild, and mitigate future damage. Yet the built environment holds enormous potential for prevention, where thoughtful design makes intentionally harmful behavior less likely to occur in the first place. Rethinking restroom design through this lens connects directly to the real challenges students and districts face every day. By relocating non-private functions into visible, supervised zones, the time students spend in truly private areas is dramatically reduced. The result is an environment that preserves privacy where it matters most and adds visibility, where appropriate, to strengthen safety and accountability.
Some photographic examples from the second article:
Notice how each toilet cubicle is a fully private space. The handwashing area is open to the school hallways. Can you see how that might change how students use these spaces?
One last thing: being able to use the toilet is a basic human right. It is one of the main reasons why schools are required to close if there’s a water outage: toilet use. So locking bathrooms is not and never can be seen as a solution no matter how difficult the situation. Taking away a human right is not a logical consequence to behavior.
I’d love to see the community and school system unite around solutions that fundamentally address the problem and respect students’ basic needs and rights.
What do you think?
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