“I am not expecting a reply to this email,” senior Joseph Dinsmore wrote in a March 18 email to more than 100 members of East’s staff. “I am expecting ACTION.”
The email, with the subject “Our Bathroom Apocalypse,” describes in a half-joking tone various alarming sights found in East’s restrooms: depleted stocks of paper towels and soap; urine, feces and menstrual blood smeared across the walls and toilet seats; broken toilet seats and “[r]ude graffiti” containing “[v]arious slurs for the family.”
In the email, Dinsmore cites the Quad C bathrooms as a particularly egregious example of these problems, but asserts that no restroom is without flaws.
“This isn’t just a small issue any longer,” he wrote. “This is a symbol of what East has become. A ruined bathroom, covered in various fluids, left behind to rot.”
That “ACTION” did eventually come. In response to questions at the Community Forum May 17, superintendent Dr. Nyah Hamlett said, “We sent a team of our facilities and maintenance crew over today, and they did a lot of cleaning… so much so that our facilities department received a thank-you email from a staff member.”
Additionally, Hamlett mentioned plans to support more frequent cleanings from both the day and night facilities crews, as well as “some restructuring of our facilities and maintenance staff across the district.”
It remains to be seen, however, what lasting impact these measures have on the overall state of the restrooms, and they weren’t enacted before extensive discussions on both the student and staff levels, spurred on in part by Dinsmore’s message.
Dinsmore said he decided to send the email after he emailed his concerns in a more serious tone to a smaller group of administrators and received no response.
“I wanted something people would read, and they would remember,” Dinsmore said. “I had experienced talking to higher-ups, principals, here and I didn’t ever really get a timely response. So I was like, ‘If I send it to every single teacher, I will get a response.’ You can’t ignore that.”
Indeed, Dinsmore said the email received several responses within the day, including automated out-of-office messages, words of support and some claiming the issue is “a student problem,” not one for the staff to deal with.
Dinsmore pushed back on that latter sentiment, saying, “This is a student problem, but it’s also an everyone problem, because, I mean, everyone uses bathrooms.”
Teachers Hope Hynes Love, William Vincent and David Ingram were among those to respond via “reply to all,” a feature Ingram describes as “a powerful weapon.” Each expressed a slightly different perspective on how best to address the issue.
“I was proud of Joe for taking the initiative and doing the work,” science teacher Ingram said. “He had to hand-type in everyone’s address, there was no ListServe. So that shows you that he was really concerned about it.”
Ingram said he is familiar with the issue as he used to use the Lower Quad A bathroom out of convenience.
“I’ve seen some gnarly stuff in there,” he said. “Nothing that everyone else hasn’t seen. I’ve seen graffiti on the walls, I’ve seen what I hope is just water flooding out, I’ve seen paper towels thrown in the urinals so they back up.”
Theatre teacher Hynes Love said she also has experience with the situation, and attributed the vandalism in large part to students skipping class to use the bathrooms as “student lounges.”
“I don’t think there’s one type of kid who’s using that bathroom as a lounge,” she said. “I think there are a bazillion different little micro-populations. But the bathrooms are literally showing the wear of children who need new rituals, new routines, new boundaries, and have made their own in those spaces.”
She said she was subbing for another teacher, “in another indication of how spread thin we are in a staff-to-student ratio,” when she received the email.
“I was really glad and excited that Joe took it up themselves to raise it as a student concern,” she said. “And to voice what I’ve been feeling: that what’s happening in the bathrooms is just a tangible metaphor of the kinds of things that are slipping through the cracks as we’ve come back to school pretending like we were starting school just like it was before.”
In her reply, Hynes Love wrote that she regularly uses the Cafe Commons bathroom to keep herself apprised of the conditions there and to show solidarity with the students who have to use the facilities. Though she has taken action herself, Hynes Love cautioned against assuming the issue can be solved by adults alone.
“It has been my experience that student response to other students’ actions is the biggest mover of the needle,” she wrote. “Perhaps it would send the message if the students with the most social cache set the expectations for how [the] bathrooms are to be maintained and used by the younger members of the student body.”
Hynes Love cited a campaign by Camellia Lee, a previous student body president and recipient of the 2008 Pauli Murray Human Relations Youth Award, as a model for students seeking to remedy the situation in the bathrooms.
According to Hynes Love, Lee noticed a problem of excessive waste piling up on Freshman Hill and in the hallways, and decided to lead the student government in relieving the burden on the custodial staff.
“SGA members were out there picking up trash at the end of every single day,” Hynes Love said. “After a week of them all picking up trash, they would say to the most compliant and eager student, ‘Can you get that as well?’”
Hynes Love believes students like Dinsmore can “ladder up” in a similar way to eventually change the culture that has left the bathrooms in such a state.
In his response to the email, Ingram pointed out the limits of student action in general, writing, “I am going to disagree with the thought that this is a problem for students to confront.”
Ingram cited a conversation that took place at a recent staff meeting. Though not solely about the bathrooms, Ingram said the discussion involved some teachers expressing discomfort with having to confront certain students in the restrooms.
“This school should not be a place where a teacher has to make a confrontation of any escalated level,” Ingram said. “However, if we believe that, and I think it is right and correct to believe that, we should definitely not ask our students to do that.”
Vincent, an engineering teacher and the non-voting parliamentarian for East’s School Improvement Team, expressed his admiration for “students who are willing to engage in the process of improving our school.”
In response to Dinsmore’s email, Vincent suggested SIT as “a very appropriate channel to communicate your concerns.” The group, which has voting representatives for students, parents and staff, typically meets within the first week of each month.
Dinsmore said that prior to Vincent’s reply, he “didn’t know” about the existence of SIT.
Junior Hunter Klosty, one of SIT’s Student Council representatives, said that lack of student awareness about the Team is “a major problem.” Topics of discussion for SIT include “reforming and rethinking PAC,” reworking AP class registration guidelines, and, of course, the bathrooms.
“The bathrooms are in a, to put it bluntly, decrepit condition,” Klosty said. “They’re not, I think, to the standard that we would want them to be, and to have a school that is so high in achievement academically, I think it’s sad that we can’t have such a standard for our infrastructure.”
Though Klosty said SIT “can certainly talk about” the situation, he also acknowledged the limits of the group’s purview.
“I don’t think it’s a SIT responsibility per se,” he said. “I think most of the responsibility and the power to change the bathrooms and to make them better rests in the administration.”
Regardless of who takes up the responsibility of maintaining the bathrooms after the district’s new cleaning initiatives, Dinsmore stressed the symbolic importance of these facilities.
“Bathrooms aren’t just bathrooms,” he wrote in an email to the ECHO. “Our rooms in this school send a message, not only to outsiders, but to the students themselves. If the bathrooms aren’t cared for, how can a student be cared for?”
