First off, on a personal note, I had to literally dive out of the way of a cabbie in downtown New Brunswick who sought fit to stomp on the gas pedal and try to run me over on a narrow city street when I was walking in a crosswalk — and then cursed me out in an unidentifiable Slavic language for daring to do so. That’s always fun.
Anyway. On with the show.
If you, like me, are an alumnus of Strongsville High School, less-than-affectionately nicknamed “The Big House,” you may have thought that administration policies, combined with generally ineffective faculty and a repressive social caste system, made the place as bleak and draconian as any upper-middle-class suburban public high school could be. Well, five years have past since I graduated and things, it seems, have gotten worse. I was going to quote from this article, but there are just so many unbelievable passages that I am going to, once again, risk being sued by a major media outlet and copy the whole article.
[First, UPDATE (11pm): There's a school district that banned a girl from walking across the stage to receive her diploma at commencement BECAUSE SHE WAVED!]
WASHINGTON – Even though Daniel Thornton occasionally needed to go to the bathroom during his AP history course last year, he also needed a B on the midterm to maintain his grade. So he did what lots of students at Forest Park Senior High School in Woodbridge do in their Darwinian pursuit of academic success: Thornton endured a full bladder and instead hoarded his two restroom passes, which, unused, were worth six points of extra credit.
It was enough to bump the 18-year-old’s midterm grade from a C-plus to a B.
“Occasionally it made days unpleasant, but I was just very careful. I would try to go in the five minutes beforehand or afterwards, between classes,” said Thornton, who will graduate this month. “Some of my classmates definitely had a lot of trouble. People around me would fidget, especially girls.”
Bladder control, especially in an era of 90-minute classes, is a vital skill in many Washington area high schools, where administrators often limit access to restrooms during class to reduce interruptions and quash potential mischief in areas without adult supervision.
Restrooms, of course, have been a choice milieu for school scofflaws since the advent of indoor plumbing. With school security a top priority, administrators have become vigilant enforcers as they try to block loitering, bullying or drug use in student restrooms.
At many schools, doors to boys and girls restrooms have been removed altogether. In Montgomery County’s Montgomery Blair High School, students can see boys standing at urinals and girls entering and exiting stalls in the bathrooms near the front office. [Um, what is this, prison? Oh. Right.]
Getting creative
Teachers have whipped up creative ways to minimize restroom visits during class. Some schools have an extra-credit incentive program, which is not universally embraced among parents or within academic circles. Although advocates say the passes — which can be used for numerous destinations — maximize classroom time, critics say it is unfair to give anyone an academic advantage based on something as unacademic as bathroom habits.
“What’s the correlation between holding your urine and succeeding on a history test?” asked Kevin Barr, principal of Georgetown Day School, a private school in the District. “My basic assumption is always that kids need to be comfortable and safe to excel in the classroom.”
The Spanish class Carol Wesley’s 15-year-old daughter takes at W.T. Woodson High School in Fairfax County offers hallway extra credit. Although Wesley sympathizes with teachers trying to maintain order, she said, “It’s absurd to reward people for not taking care of simple human bodily functions when necessary.”
Public schools in the District, Virginia and Maryland do not have systemwide policies about bathroom rules but leave it to individual schools or classroom teachers to decide. Many teachers opt for the simple and venerable hall pass, which has been around for decades. In that case, students carry a visible pass so hallway monitors can immediately tell that they are authorized to be out of class.
Other schools use a more archival approach to keep track of students and their bathroom habits: log sheets on which students must jot down the time they need to leave class and their destination. A teacher’s initials are also needed.
The log sheets — in a small agenda book given out at the beginning of the year — help teachers check how often students use the restroom during class — indicating which ones may be cadging a break. In one agenda book, the log sheet is euphemistically called the Hallway Passport. [I remember this in my HS agenda, but it was never used in Strongsville. How does this *not* smack of a Gestapo-style "show me your papers" environment? Hall passes are one thing, but this just strikes me as not only unnecessary but soul-crushing as well. Hm. I wonder if this is why so many people are so willing to have an intrusive government ... because they were conditioned for it from their youth?]
Some students who use the log sheets prefer them because they don’t have other people’s germs and they’re never scrounging for a pass. Other students, such as Samantha Mosquera at Forest Park, find the log absurd.
“Sometimes, I’ll just go through the book, and I’ll see how many times I’ve gone to the bathroom in the year, and I’m like, ‘What the heck?’ It’s a lot,” said Mosquera, 18, a senior on the crew team, who noted that she has to drink water all day to stay hydrated for her tough afternoon practices. “It should be like college, especially for seniors. We can vote. We can go to war. We should be able to pee whenever we want.” [Yeah, putting it in that context highlights the insanity. ... But hey, you can't drink either, so the government regulates what happens at both ends.]
Changing behavior
Bathroom rules have become so ingrained in students’ psyches that they affect hallway culture. With only five or so minutes between classes, students must make potentially life-altering decisions: Should I go, or should I flirt with my locker neighbor? [Is the journalist trying to be cute or is he being serious? It's honestly kinda hard to tell.]
At Albert Einstein High School in Montgomery, students find any scrap piece of paper — or a hand will suffice — on which to sign a teacher’s name and time. But Principal James Fernandez said he wants to order agenda books with log sheets for next year.
“The agenda books provide accountability,” Fernandez said. [And humiliation. That too.]
Sometimes a game of cloak and dagger ensues. At Eleanor Roosevelt High School in Prince George’s County, some students have gotten in trouble for swiping blank passes off of teachers’ desks and forging teachers’ signatures, said Robynne Prince, an assistant principal.
At other times, students get in trouble when they sneak off to a restroom nowhere near their class but within shouting distance to a friend in an another room. Recently, Prince caught a student in the cafeteria who had a pass for the restroom only.
“He said, ‘Well I just stopped in to talk to someone,’ so I followed him from table to table,” she recalled. “I questioned him and said, ‘What class do you belong to?’ He said, ‘English,’ but that was on the second floor — and we were on the first floor, so I know he passed three bathrooms.” [Well things like that have happened since our grandparents were in school, but we didn't feel
the need to resort to a bunker mentality.]
That’s why, at schools such as Forest Park in Prince William County and W.T. Woodson in Fairfax — some teachers offer extra credit if students stay put. “It gets the students to plan ahead and organize. It’s grown in popularity because teachers feel that it cuts down on disruptions,” said Beverly Ellis, an AP history teacher at Forest Park. “I discourage them from leaving unless it’s a real emergency. They’ve got to convince me.”
For Daniel Thornton, one of Ellis’s students, the system played a minor role in his success. He got a full tuition scholarship to Washington and Lee University. And this week, he expects to be named valedictorian. [Did they give him a keyring made out of melted-down Yugos as a reward? Inside joke, people.]
I don’t think I’m going to offer any further comment, for it would simply be a string of obscenities.
