Bathrooms all around school, not only in Freehold, but also in most of NJ, have become more of a hangout spot than an actual bathroom. People use bathrooms to skip classes, and do things that are not allowed on school grounds, and people will continue to do these things because there are no consequences. While some schools do give consequences, most students have found a way to get out of it, like roaming the halls, or schools just don’t enforce the consequences well enough. Bathrooms are spots where things like fights and bullying happen all in secret.
In almost every bathroom, a person can find things like broken stalls, dirty sinks, leaks, and all sorts of graffiti. The floors are poorly maintained, and even with all the work the people put into cleaning the bathroom, without the proper things needed, the bathrooms rarely get the cleaning needed to meet the “standards.” The bathrooms can be so bad and unsafe for some people that certain students wait till they get home because they don’t trust how the school handles what goes on in the bathroom.
The condition of a bathroom can seem unnecessary to how students learn, but it can actually affect students way more than the schools admit. Students who feel the need to avoid bathrooms in school altogether because they feel unsafe and unpredictable, can be distracted, and doing this almost every day is unhealthy for the kids. These unmaintained bathrooms can give off the message that schools only care about education, while that may be what schools are for, they should still care about the well-being of their students. Providing resources to maintain and control these bathrooms will support the well-being of the students. Also, these adjustments do not have to be expensive; all they really need is a way to put more effort into making bathrooms cleaner to show that they care about the well-being of kids, and enforce the punishments for doing something you shouldn’t be doing in the school bathrooms.
