By Nevaeya Lotches and Malinda Roland
Destruction in the restrooms over the last few weeks has led to inordinate amounts of extra work for West High custodians. This is due in large part to the new ‘devious licks’ challenge popularized on Tik Tok.
This involves soap dispensers to other necessities to keep the school safe and running. Hourly checks on the bathroom are now taking place to try to find the people doing these ‘devious licks’ where they steal property or are vandalizing the bathrooms.
“We’re doing more restroom checks during the day now, to kind of get a grasp. Walking in, see, and then come out and then within that hour. If something happens, we’ll get security to run a tape back and they’ll be able to say, hey Billy he went off in there at 9:55am, and this happened, roughly between second hour. So we’re trying to pinpoint the time down and when it happens so we can find those students that are doing it.” Head Custodian Billy McPherson said.
High alert for the restrooms has increased due to the harsh destruction it has cost. The challenge is being taken as a health concern in school. Some students are ruining soap dispensers, which is especially dangerous during a pandemic.
“Contamination, that’s the health part. So when they take the soap off the walls, guys are urinating in the soap, putting it back up there so when you go to get soap, you’re getting someone’s urine, mixed with the soap on their hands and so we had that happen so now what’s happening is if anyone takes that off we don’t put that back up, we just get a whole other soap dispenser, another cartridge. The contamination part is really, people are putting things inside the dispensers that don’t go. So what’s happening so people go off in there,and you’re not made aware of it.” McPherson said.
It’s not only soap dispensers being vandalized, McPherson says they have also had to contend with fire extinguishers, projectors, paper towel dispensers, ceilings, pencil sharpeners, basically anything that’ll fit in a backpack. That’s not the worst of it.
“So what’s happening is, they’re taking the toilet paper off the dispenser, putting them off in the toilets, taking a ‘number two’ on top of that. So now, we’ve got to reverse a trash bag, put our hands in there and dig all the big rolls of toilet paper out on top of the ‘number two.’ And this just all is, you know, I think it’s just unfair, but it’s true enough it’s my job so I’ve got to do it, but I still say hey, stop, whoever is doing it, stop.” McPherson said.
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