Ah, another bathroom closed! Photo courtesy of junior Sage Meeks.

  Incoming students are starting to see a problem at San Luis Obispo High School that the upperclassmen are far too familiar with. The bathrooms are always closed and the next closest bathroom needs to be closer. The issue stretches much farther than just inconvenience though, the reasons the bathrooms are closed is a growing concern for both students and faculty.

  Vandalism in bathrooms is nothing new however, after the “devious lick” trend from TikTok after COVID-19, everything has become much worse. Usually, you have to deal with writing on the walls and some trash, now entire stall doors are being taken off and bathrooms end up closed for over a week because of students’ actions.

  “They are closed way too often, I have to run to the language building from the portables or math building whenever we have bathrooms closed but even that solution doesn’t work because of how often the language bathrooms are closed too,” said freshman Jay Whitson.

  Recently the boys bathroom in the math building had its interior handle broken off, and not twenty-four hours after the bathroom was repaired someone felt the need to draw a hate symbol, prompting it to be closed again.

 “The bathrooms at SLOHS are an issue, but it isn’t unique to our students. Other schools suffer from the same issue. For now, we just try to catch the students that vandalize the bathrooms, it’s mostly freshmen as they don’t realize quite how many cameras are all around the school,” said math teacher Steven Arata.

  It all goes back to the old saying “this is why we can’t have anything nice,” a small number of students makes everyone’s life harder for nothing. SLOHS has great bathrooms and we all need to take care of them before we lose the privilege of having these facilities.

  “It’s been an issue my entire time at SLOHS, the amount that I have to be out of class for the bathroom can be unbelievable. Whether it’s waiting for a bathroom or stall or needing to walk across campus cause it’s closed,” said senior Emma Savory.

  Vandalism is not the only issue of course, smoking and vaping in particular have long been a problem. Spending ten-plus minutes for a gender-neutral bathroom or a stall, likely just someone getting their fix in the middle of class, isn’t out of the norm.

  Hopefully, we won’t have to resort to something like putting porta potties on campus, but the vandalism and vaping issues are getting out of hand.

SLOHS students need to do better. If students see anything please text a tip so we don’t have to wait for bathrooms anymore!