Lou Glatt

Third floor bathroom open after recent student complaints.

Frustration among female students at South High is increasing as the issue of the girls’ bathrooms’ inaccessibility has yet to be properly addressed. The administration is still frequently locking the bathroom doors despite constant complaints from students. This has been done in the name of combating misuse of South’s facilities, but with nowhere to relieve themselves, female students believe there must be a better way. 

The bathrooms are closed due to reports of vaping, smoking, opioid use, vandalism, and constant littering and disrespect within the bathrooms. The majority of the girl’s bathrooms reside on the third floor but are consistently closed. This means that the second-floor bathroom is almost always overflowing with students and the first-floor bathroom is unused and inconvenient for students who have the majority of their classes on the 2nd and 3rd floors. Several female students have communicated the problems yet there is no movement for change from school administration.

Jane Rohlfing, a senior at South High School, started a student-led district union: “The Student Union of Minneapolis.” This union actively works on solving district-wide issues including the current restroom issues. Rohlfing shares her frustrations, “It takes time away from my class, time where I could be learning.” This has not only occurred to Rohlfing but to many other female students at South. It is not uncommon for students to be late to class because they are in line waiting to use the restroom. The wait time only increases for students as the amount of bathrooms available to students decreases. 

Rohlfing states that this could also be “an actual health issue” A few students reported having contracted UTIs due to being unable to use the bathroom for extended periods. Some students had to leave school early because they weren’t able to change their period products and tend to their needs. Beyond being frustrating, these are examples of how the bathrooms being unavailable has also put the health of the students at risk. 

Understaffing janitors has led to the bathrooms not having soap and paper towels, and on occasion, even no toilet paper. This has become another factor in the bathrooms being closed. With fewer people able to keep the bathrooms clean and sanitary, the bathrooms become more of a risk to the health of students and they need to be closed more often.  

Chris Yorahee, 9th-grade restorative advocate dean, shares that the deans close the bathrooms to slow down and prevent the activities happening in the bathrooms, “at times the bathroom is so congested and so overwhelming and to slow down the activity they will lock them.”While the deans understand students’ complaints, they feel powerless to address them because all the deans are male and cannot go into the bathrooms to enforce the rules themselves. Due to this, they feel their only option is to close the bathrooms altogether. Yorahee is often on the 3rd floor along with other deans, willing to open bathrooms for students in need. He says he has no problem with doing so. The administration has been trying to find female staff who can come into the women’s bathroom and regulate the amount of kids coming in and out. But are hard-pressed to find staff that have the time to sit outside the bathrooms, especially with the multitude of things going on. 

These problems aren’t just present at South, they appear to be happening in other high schools. Other schools deal with this similar issue by limiting the amount of kids coming in and out of the restrooms at a time. When it comes to personnel, the Minneapolis district as a whole is understaffed, however, this is particularly true at South. “We have a unique situation in this building, we are a distinctive school,” Yorahee says referring to the size of the special education program and the number of students with IEPS/504s that attend South. South simply doesn’t have the extra staff on hand to control and regulate the bathrooms. 

Despite the common misconception that deans are solely responsible for closing bathrooms- the state of the girls’ bathroom is on the entire South community. “Students are ruining it for the others,” says Yorahee. Until a new system is put in place, we have to rely on students to respect our bathrooms.