When you walk into a bathroom at Barnstable High School, you see broken sinks and stalls that are flooded from the toilets. This is no way high school students should treat their bathrooms or how they should be left. There are many problems with these bathrooms either caused by students or just mere flooding problems with the bathrooms.

I find it disgusting and very disrespectful to find the bathrooms in this state every time I have tried to use them since my eighth grade year. I do not like the fact that the same toilets and sinks are broken and are not getting fixed in the 2600, 1600 and 1500 bathrooms. It is not fair to the people who actually want to use the bathrooms. 

The writing on the stalls doors and walls are also not appropriate for school and it is not something I would want visitors to read if they use our bathrooms. Is it students causing the problems or is it just the school not wanting to get the bathrooms fixed, because to those of us who just simply want to use the bathrooms it is not fair?

Students also have to be careful using certain bathrooms because some have such bad damage I just don’t bother to go into them anymore. The floors are flooded most of the time either in the stalls around the toilets or around the sinks in all of the bathrooms. It’s getting ridiculous because I just want to be able to use the bathroom and wash my hands without having to step in puddles all over the place. The sinks are also purposefully clogged by students with paper towels almost every day. Obviously nobody wants to take the paper towel out because that is disgusting. 

There are also issues with bathrooms being closed multiple times already this year. The bathroom in the 1500s is always full of people vaping whenever I go in there, and there is always at least one broken toilet or sink. Whenever you walk into the 2200 bathroom you see just one giant puddle on the floor underneath the two same toilets that seem to never get fixed. In the 2700 bathroom there are always two or three girls in the big stall just hanging out or vaping, but you also have the sinks that leak all over the place. There is an issue with every bathroom, and they are all the same. There are girls vaping and leaking toilets and sinks that nobody will fix. 

Elizabeth Freedman, the principal at BHS, sent an email out with a survey she asked students if they felt physically safe at school. I had to answer that question as sometimes because if I am being honest I do not feel safe going to the bathroom at school with all the vaping issues and the way the bathrooms are just left disgusting every day.