Supervision doesn’t really work. As much as staff try to hamper delinquent acts, there’s always something happening at Van Nuys High School.
The most egregious case of the faults of supervision happens in the stalls. The problem has snowballed into something worse – something that isn’t even worth checking.
Students have indulged in utilizing the bathrooms for everything but its intended purposes. What was meant to be a quick pit-stop to remedy natural bodily functions has become a social haven for filming, uncleanliness and anarchy.
Groups of people rally together in the bathrooms with bathroom passes from classrooms all across campus. This is especially noticeable in the girls bathroom where if one goes, a plus-one is bound to follow.
This isn’t usually a problem if these groups are quick enough, however, it becomes a different scenario when people take photos of themselves and film TikToks in the restrooms to clog up the bathroom lines.
It calls into question whether mirrors — which were removed before the start of the school year — in the bathrooms are for the best.
A common warning sign for this phenomenon is the constant giggling in stalls where there is definitely more than one person in the stall. It also signals that prospective bathroom-users might as well camp out because they are going to be there a while.
However, it’s not just cameras that congest the bathroom lines.
Students are also seen doing piercings. Something about unsanitary places calls students to pierce ears, noses and even eyebrows.
Without proper hygiene required to safely pierce, students freely pierce their friends and erratically leave droplets of blood on the floor.
Not only is this incredibly dangerous for the students being pierced, it magnifies the risk of bloodborne pathogens for students who just need to use the restroom.
When the staff finally decide to step in and take a peek, the blood on the floor just happens to slip their mind.
Something that can’t possibly slip their mind, however, are the clouds of pungent smoke that fill the air. Smoking students is one of many things that staff in nearly every high school can’t seem to get under control — this generation of high schoolers has already succumbed to smoking.
Whether it’s weed or nicotine, the puffs of second-hand smoke fill entire buildings and deter any students who actually want to use the restroom for its intended purposes.
By the time the smoke creeps out of the bathrooms, staff already know. And if that isn’t a dead giveaway, then the swaths of red-eyed teenagers who spill out of the bathroom are.
Junior Sulanita Morales shared her account.
“Smoking just stinks up the entire bathroom and it’s unnecessary,” Morales said. “It’s not good for you and you’re just taking up your own time and others, causing people to wait in line.”
While smoking is a clear hindrance to the use of the school bathrooms, there is something else that basically makes them unusable.
Students with toilet paper, drugs and food are all too eager to trash the bathrooms.
Sinks get trashed and clogged with these same items and make what would be a brisk hand-washing into something that might not even happen.
Moreover, depending on the severity of their destruction, toilets can become clogged and cause them to leak or break, creating an unavailable stall. Aside from slowing down the line further, it becomes a costly expense for the school.
All these factors mesh simultaneously into a chaotic whirlwind that leaves the school’s poor janitors cleaning up a larger mess than they signed up for.
Bathrooms aren’t supposed to be social hotspots — students shouldn’t even want to be in them for longer than they have to. But misbehavior finds a way.
Our staff needs to strictly supervise the bathrooms. Students aren’t using it for intended purposes and treat it like it’s a lawless land.
And for students, if you choose to engage in these questionable activities, do it somewhere else. Somewhere that doesn’t disrupt the natural order.
