For the past couple months at Neuqua Valley High School, there has been an excessive amount of complaints from male students who are unable to use the men’s room. Complaints range from accounts of terrible student behavior inside the bathrooms to putrid odors resonating inside and ungodly messes of who knows what on the walls and floor.

There has also been a recurrence of certain bathrooms being worse or better than others. The boy’s bathroom next to the World Language Hallway has smelled like spoiled milk for the past five months after dozens of chocolate milk cartons were opened and splattered all over the toilets, mirrors and sinks. Many more bathrooms also have some sort of regular mess for you to walk in up like opening up a can of worms. The only bathrooms that have the highest chance of being clean and usable, keyword being chance, are the ones at the auditorium and in the middle of the athletic hallway. This means that unless you want to play house maiden and clean an entire toilet seat that has urine and bodily fluids sprayed all over it, you could walk the entire perimeter of the school depending on where you are to one of the sides of the school that may have a clean toilet to use.

Now, sure, you might have the mercy of being usually very close to either side of the Neuqua, but the next chance factor that can come your way is whether or not the door is locked or unlocked. Many staff claim that these doors are locked because of cleaning that’s going on, but I have reason to believe this is far from the truth. Many times these doors are locked because a person with a key simply forgot to unlock it when they finished cleaning or doing whatever. I once saw a staff member, not a janitor, walk outside of the bathrooms in the athletic hallway near the portraits and lock it as if she didn’t want anybody in there. This was not a teacher’s bathroom, by the way, as I remember many times I was able to use this in the beginning of the year. So it begs the question, are some staff members keeping some student bathrooms primarily to themselves?

It would not be surprising if these two problems are interwoven. The messes sadly are just a natural thing inside of a public highschool, but it is obvious that they are so bad that people including staff are developing their own strategies to make it easier for themselves. Us students can strategize to run to a farther part of the school to get a cleaner bathroom, but staff themselves can lock and unlock the doors to the best bathrooms to keep it as student-free as possible.

Given that these problems are connected, I have a couple ideas that could solve both of them. The most simple yet unrealistic one is to build more bathrooms around the school in areas that feel empty. I’m not an expert on how the school handles its funds, but I feel as though we have more than enough space around certain hallways that could easily use more bathrooms to dampen the amount of overuse to the already existing bathrooms. Another solution which could be easier, yet may need much more debate, is our usage of school cameras in the hallways. When I first saw the aftermath of the chocolate milk mess in the school bathroom near the language hallway, I immediately thought, “How the heck did this even happen?” Milk cartons were everywhere—at least five to ten. There is also a camera right above the general area that has the bathroom entrance. Some hooligan(s) had to carry all that milk throughout the hall from the lunchroom into the bathroom and spill all of it in there. If we identified these idiots, we could actually prevent things like this from happening. To stop general messes like manure or urine on the toilet seat, we need to start from square one and treat these children like children. Put up laminated posters in every stall and bathroom to keep the area clean, wash your hands and be mindful of others.

These solutions aren’t the only ones, as I’m sure if this was a school effort there could be more and even better ideas put into place. After all, it’s obvious that the problem will only get worse if we don’t take a stand. Students will keep using horrid bathrooms, janitors will keep being required to clean who-knows-what inside, and teachers and other staff will continue to turn a blind eye and possibly misuse their power.