As the days progress in the year 2025, Leaders High School gets a little more strict. First, it was Yondr pouches that banned all phone usage and now it’s the bathroom schedule. Now I don’t need to be an oracle to say that we all saw this coming.
The many reports of students vaping, vandalizing the bathroom, skipping, and overall doing anything BUT use the bathroom would probably push some discipline tactic to fix this issue. However many questions (including teachers) why the bathrooms are closed during the Crew and Lunch period. You and I would assume that would be the best time to use the bathrooms but for some reason, those are the times when the bathroom is locked. Jasmine, a junior at Leaders says, “I think it’s a violation for the students that actually need to use the bathroom during crew and it’s unfair that some people actually need to use the bathrooms but can’t because some people chose to be childish.”
Ms. Hwang, one of the teachers in the school that teaches the media & communications and runs the Journalism club says “I do like that people can’t use the bathroom during Crew, because it’s already a shorter period of time. And so people are like hopping in and out during crew, then it can sometimes take away from circles or from whatever activities are happening in crew. But I do think that they aren’t always the best about having it open during passing period, so allowing it to be open during passing period between, like third period and crew.”
When I asked Ms. Hwang how Mr. Mullen issued this policy to the staff she stated, “They started having sign-in and sent an email saying, like, that people should have a pass to go the bathroom”. She also claimed that they got an email that Ms Acevedo would be monitoring the bathrooms as well as the bathrooms would be reassigned and changed. She stated this was because “the teachers had given feedback that the gender-neutral bathroom was not easily accessible.”
Ms. Hwang said that they had also gotten an email when Ms. Acevedo would be joining the Leaders staff as a school aide. While many people believe that Ms. Acevedo is only in charge of the bathroom schedules, she actually does a lot: helping with the Yondr pouches, retrieving late kids from the main office, and among other things. I would like to note that just because I, as well as many students, don’t agree with how the bathroom schedule is run, I do not hold any personal grudge against Ms. Acevedo; I simply believe she’s just doing her job. But I do think there can be changes.
Overall, I do believe that there should be some sort of order for the bathrooms, but I think they should be flexible in a way that students can use the bathroom without being rejected because the bathrooms are locked or whatever may be the case. After all, students are humans and UTIs are not fun. Based on what I have heard: the bathrooms are closed during lunch and crew because there is no teacher aide operating the desk for kids to sign in when they use the bathroom. So a suggestion I would make would be to hire more teacher aides so this way bathrooms can still be open during these periods and there will still be supervision over the bathroom.