When going to the bathroom causes you to miss at least half of your AP Biology class, what do you do? What if the bathrooms are locked during lunch?
Recently, Palm Harbor University High School (ranked as one of Newsweek’s “Top 100 High Schools”) has received numerous bomb threats, two of which were written in a stall in the women's restroom. The school board did what they thought was necessary- they made it nearly impossible to use these restrooms.
Now whenever a female student has that urge, she must:
1. Sign out of her classroom.
2. Go to the ONLY restroom that is not locked during that specific period.
3. Wait in a line that usually snakes out the door, and upon reaching her turn, go about her business.
4. Walk to the office and get her pass signed by an administrator.
5. Go back to class and sign back in.
The entire process may take anywhere from 15-35 minutes depending on how long the line for the restroom is when she gets there. (It is usually pretty long, since only one restroom is open at any given time.) This is absolutely ridiculous. Sure, the school has the duty to protect the students from the threats they were receiving, but is stripping the girls of their basic human rights really the way to ensure safety? Who is to say that it was not a young man who wrote the threat in the women’s restroom to throw off suspicion? Why is it necessary to punish these young women by making them choose between 35 minutes of class or relief?
-C
When my school was receiving threats (handwritten notes on papers left in the girl's bathroom), they just didn't let anybody leave during class. Not a problem, really, because we all knew that class was an hour and a half long, and that we should go to the bathroom, fill up our water bottles, and anything else we needed to do between classes. Even if they'd been that overboard, there still wouldn't have been much of a line - we only had three bathrooms in the school, not counting the few stalls in the locker rooms that were for gym students only.
I don't need drugs - I have genetics.
That's tough, though. What about feminine emergencies,or even diarrhea? It seems like some type of personal suffering/failure to allow appropriate hygiene could occur if someone happened to leak. I had a friend in HS that had to change her tampon about every 30 minutes on some days, and everyone suffers from the occasional, unexpected upset stomach.
cheers,
F*** Religion. Read more here:
http://www.progressiveu.org/020528-f-religion
If it was an absolute emergency, they'd let you go, but if you just forgot to go before you came to class because you were talking, well, that's your own problem. The threats were only going on for about a week or so before they caught the person, though. If you were allowed out of the classroom, you had to sign out on a sheet of paper kept next to the door, include the time and where you were going, then sign back in when you were done. They continued the sign-in and sign-out afterwards, too, because we had a problem with people who thought it was funny to stop up toilets and such, and that made it easier for the people in charge to figure out who did it.
I don't need drugs - I have genetics.
Our school got two bomb threats in one week, one of them a note in a girl's bathroom. Now we only have one entrance to the school in the morning: by the front, which sucks if you drive to school (the student parking lot is at the bottom of a very steep hill that usually leads to an entrance by the library). Basically, no one is allowed out of class during class time. Period. For a while, law enforcement officials had to search our bags, meaning anyone that arrived at 7:50 or later was late for first block, guaranteed.
Fake bomb threats suck.
Nope. No signature for you. XP
Wow. Unbelievable. It seems like schools often have knee-jerk reactions to situations like this. They don't want to appear as though they are doing nothing about bomb threats and safety, etc. So they act quickly and make new rules. Unfortunately, it seems as though they forsake the brainstorming process that would yield a solution that's most beneficial. It's a classic case of solving one problem while creating another!
I definitely know where you are coming from. They lock the bathrooms up at my school because they smell like smoke. They believe that if the bathrooms stay locked that the kids won't smoke. What these administrators don't realize is that the good kids suffer too because nature calls! Next thing you know they'll have to add using the rest room as one of our freedoms in he first amendment!
this sounds really unreasonable to me.
Maybe the students should just go outside and start peeing on the front lawn? It would make a statement and anyone driving by the school would beging to wonder why all the students are relieving their bladders outside. It could start a community-wide protest!
Maybe that's just the completely insane rebel inside me, but I would not stand for it, especially losing so much class time. What do the girls do if they have a menstrual emergency? It would be so embarassing having to stand in a line in front of the rest of the school to wait until they are allowed to take care of it.