Trying to go to the restroom from the portables feels like playing a game in which you find an obstacle course in your way, preventing you from making it to a toilet before you burst. Many students end up needing to go to the restroom after lunch, but this is also the time that the custodians clean up in the cafeteria, including restrooms. Many times, they decide to lock the cafeteria in order to work without any interruptions or students getting in the way. Other times, they only lock the restrooms or block the entrance while they clean them and they do this to finish cleaning and catch a break or to finish their shift and go home. Because of this, a lot of the time students are not able to go to the restrooms in the cafeteria, giving them no choice but to go to the restrooms in the main building- which also has its obstacles to overcome. To avoid students and outsiders roaming around campus, they lock the gates between the cafeteria and the red hall. This gives students no choice but to go to the gates between the gym and cafeteria to access the courtyard and the main building. The challenges don’t stop there. The closest doors students have access to are the ones in the red hall, but a lot of the time students don’t want to open them and administrators tell you to go to the restrooms at the front. This can be a great inconvenience to students. For example, if it’s an emergency, they give students no choice but to keep waiting and go to the restrooms at the front of the school. But even if you go there, it often takes a while for someone to finally open the door. Many students inside the building will ignore you to not take the extra time to open the door for you, which gives us no choice but to wait- which sometimes might take anywhere from 5 to 10 minutes.All of this time wasted to search for an entrance and waiting to be let into the main building is valuable instruction time that we are missing. Getting to a restroom should not be so difficult, and it should not take so much time. Not only is it inconvenient for the students making their way to the restroom, but it also inconveniences other students in the classroom waiting for the pass to come back so they can go to the restroom. This may also disturb teachers because they know sometimes it’s an emergency, but they also can’t give a pass to every student because they could also get in trouble for letting out many students at the same time.
This restroom access issue is just a symptom of the larger problem of Akins having to get by with more than 20 portable classrooms for about 20 years. I believe that it is time that we either build a restroom for the students in the portables or finally build a new wing of the school that can replace all of the portable classrooms and provide safe and convenient restrooms. This would not only help out the students, but it would also help the teachers feel safer in their classrooms. Beyond the bathroom problem, the portables have had many issues- including the floor breaking, classrooms having mold, AC problems, and door locks not working. But one of the biggest problems has always been the fact that the portables don’t feel as safe. Before they put peepholes in the doors, many teachers talked about how they didn’t feel safe opening their doors for someone because they couldn’t tell who was at the door. This left teachers feeling on edge, knowing that anyone could knock and they would have to open the door regardless.
The struggle of trying to access the cafeteria restrooms is not the only restroom problem we have on campus. The fine arts hall restrooms have also always been a problem. The whole year, they have been keeping the fine arts restrooms locked, with only two teachers holding keys to unlock for their classes exclusively.
The issue with the practice of locking the restrooms is that some students have no choice but to go to the main building to access the restrooms, which gives them the same issues as the cafeteria restrooms. Some students are in art classrooms in the Fine Arts hall that do not allow them to travel through the fine arts building to reach the main building. And on top of that, many students struggle with getting into the main building through the green hall, due to the low level of traffic and the lack of visibility of the door from classrooms.
Our only other option is to travel all the way to the front which gives us the same problems as the portables with the only difference being that it’s easy to go back to the portables but not so easy to go back into the fine arts building. With the fine arts building you have the same struggle of no one opening the doors to the Fine Arts hall, and a lot of the time all you can do is wait until you finally see someone out in the halls because there’s no use in knocking at the doors because the classrooms around are not able to hear the knocking.
When the school district created the list of projects that were included in the 2017 and 2022 bond issue propositions, a plan to replace the portables with a permanent building was conspicuously absent from the list of campus improvement projects. The problems that Akins students experience just trying to go to the bathroom are just another reason on a long list of why the district needs to replace the portables with a building, where students can go to the bathroom without going on a goose chase looking for a clean and convenient toilet.
