There’s nothing more disgusting than walking into a bathroom to find it completely trashed and destroyed. Do you ever get that uneasy feeling walking into a gas station bathroom that smells and looks like a wild boar fight has just ended? Unfortunately, our own bathrooms here at Memorial are becoming the same way, but instead of pigs trashing the bathroom, it’s our own student body. This has to end. 

Our bathrooms have several “yuck” factors. Wet toilet paper can be seen thrown against the walls, feces has been spread all over stalls and toilet seats, and whole paper towel rolls, meant for us to dry our hands, they are not to be thrown in the toilets. We are 14-18 year olds, and it’s about time we grow up and start showing respect to our school facilities.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve walked into one of our bathrooms to find it trashed, and what doesn’t make sense to me, is why we are doing it. We are high school students, we should know better. It’s sad to me that elementary school bathrooms stay cleaner than our own. If children can respect their school, we can too.

Down in the restrooms by the field house, you may have noticed that for a short period of time, brand new hygiene products such as deodorant and toothpaste were given to us for FREE, for our own personal use when we needed it. We are lucky to have faculty members that care about us enough to get us these items, and they certainly come in handy when we need them.

However, those products were used by students to vandalize the bathrooms, and as a result, the free products are no longer easily accessible. To get them, we now have to go to the athletic office and ask for them, and as a student with pits that sweat uncontrollably sometimes, I’d be embarrassed to go up to Ms. Tubbs and ask for what I need, and I’m sure other students feel the same way. By vandalizing the bathrooms with those hygiene products, we are basically slapping those faculty members in the face who simply wanted to do something nice for us.

“The bathrooms here are just horrible,” senior Jerry Thiel said. “I see kids on Snapchat recording themselves ruining the bathrooms and it makes me feel bad that our janitors have to clean up after unmannerly kids.” 

Now, I’m sure many of you are thinking, “Isn’t it their job to clean the bathrooms?” yes, cleaning the bathrooms is one of the many tasks they are assigned, but nobody should have to clean up someone else’s feces on stall walls. In the same respect, our custodians should not have to scrape wet toilet paper off the walls and bathroom mirrors that were thrown there. We should be courteous and make our custodians jobs easier.

“It makes me upset when people trash places and try justifying it by saying things like ‘it’s the janitors job to clean it’ Like No, you’re being rude by making their jobs and their lives harder than it needs to be,” Senior Patsi Ward said. “It isn’t difficult to be a good, civilized human being and being a jerk isn’t attractive.”

What’s one way to show courtesy to others in the bathroom? FLUSH THE TOILETS. It is beyond disgusting to walk into a stall and find feces that wasn’t flushed, and it makes the entire bathroom smell like boo boo. Flush the toilets and make our bathrooms smell like respectable facilities again.

In addition to flushing the toilets, show courtesy by throwing paper towels away when you are done with them. If you miss the trash trying to shoot like Kobe, the least you can do is pick up the paper towel that missed and throw it away like normal so it makes it into the bin. Leaving trash on the floor is disrespectful and it’s another reason our bathrooms look horrible. 

So what can we do to put an end to this? It’s simple. Start respecting our bathrooms. It’s not cool to ruin them and it won’t make you more popular if you trash the bathrooms and flex about it on Snapchat.