Unfortunately, for the past few years now, the second floor bathrooms as well as half of the first floor bathrooms have been closed to students during fifth period. The only ones that have been open during these hours are located across from Mr. Swan’s office.

The closing of bathrooms has caused many issues over the years, especially for male students. Recently, the only available bathroom for males has been out of order due to some unknown reoccurring issues. Now, in order for those students to use the bathroom, they must walk around the perimeter of the school to find one that is open and if there is none, they must venture all the way to the nurse’s office.

Students have been complaining about these recent conditions, claiming that for a high school, the decisions to close most of the bathrooms is childish and mature, not to mention just an overall nuisance. At first it seemed that the closed bathrooms were not really that big of a deal, but they have become a big deal for two reasons.

One is that the women’s bathroom becomes overly crowded and begins to look intimidating to some, thus sending more students to the nurse to use their restroom. Many girls flood the bathrooms fifth period because a lack of time in between classes prohibits them from doing so during the day.

The second reason that these closed bathrooms are a problem is that students are more likely to disturb their fifth period classes when leaving to use the restroom. Due to this, teachers have been constantly asking students to wait until lunch to go but for those who can’t, they simply have to leave the room to find an open bathroom.

Although the bathrooms have been closed for a few years now, this was not always the case. Over those years, some problems have arisen when all the bathrooms open were left open. For example, students tend to smoke, bully and use electronics in the bathrooms.

What will closing a few do to stop it?
The answer is nothing. If a student wants to commit such acts they will do it when they want and where they want to. Just because the location of the bathroom changes doesn’t mean they will stop doing it. In fact, having only one bathroom open might even increase the chance of such occurrences happening.

For students who do not do anything wrong in the bathroom, they have been left to suffer for the mistakes by others. This year’s students shouldn’t have to pay for these mistakes. The simple answer to this problem would be to leave all of the bathrooms open during lunch. It might take some supervision and some good behavior on behalf of Law’s student body, but a change needs to be made.