After a couple of weeks of missing mirrors and broken toilets became a pattern of destruction around the school, the administrative team made a decision that many students would feel in their bladders: closing the third floor bathrooms.
Monday, Sept. 27 was the first day of running from floor to floor only to find a line of people who also had to run around to find a restroom. What should’ve been a four to five minute loss of class time quickly increased to over ten minutes.
“The bell will ring a couple of times and there will still be a group of girls waiting to use the restroom,” English teacher Mr. Arnatt said. “I had to get one of the female teachers to run them out.”
With his class room being so close to one of the only open restrooms in the school, Mr. Arnatt often checks the boys’ bathroom to make sure nothing else has been taken or destroyed.
“I usually try to check up around twice a day,” Mr. Arnatt said. “There’s no mirrors and the soap dispenser doesn’t work,” Mr. Arnatt said. “It’s pretty bad because there’s nowhere else to go.”
With the influx of students, the supplies being used in the available bathrooms have started to run out in the middle of the day.
“We have a wonderful custodial staff and the minute that we get the report of something or we notice something they are on top of trying to get it fixed or to get it replaced,” assistant principal Mrs. Kelli Johnson said. “We are slowly opening more per student requests, because they are finding it difficult and we want to listen to their concerns as well.”
As long as the vandalism of the bathroom stops, the administration will continue to open bathrooms. So far we have gotten back some more bathrooms in the fine arts building as well as the 3rd floor C/D bathrooms.
“One thing I would tell the student body is that you need to have pride in your school,” Mrs. Johnson said. “When you graduate you’re gonna say you graduated from MacArthur and you don’t wanna say I graduated from MacArthur where we destroyed our bathrooms for two years. So I think just take pride in your school and take pride in your area.”
This type of vandalism is pretty unprecedented in our school’s history so the administrative team is having to make new changes to figure out the consequences for any more offenses.
“We take it case by case,” Mrs. Johnson said. “We take it as they happen so the administrative team would get with Mr. Hernandez and we would come up with a game plan based on the new occurrence whatever that is and the impact of it on students and on our school.”
Teachers and students alike are hoping that we can earn our bathrooms back and that something like this never happens again.
“In my twenty years of teaching I’ve seen graffiti in the restrooms, but never have I seen destruction of the restroom,” Mr. Arnatt said. “That’s really disappointing and it basically affects everybody.”
