No restroom passes during AT

At West High, there is a rule where students are prohibited from using the restroom during academy time because some students who take advantage of restroom passes. Although, students are allowed to use the restroom if it’s an emergency, some students have caused problems in the restrooms.

“A part of it had to do with vandalism going on in the bathroom, part of it had to do with kids abusing it, part of it had to do with not holding kids accountable and kids being tardy, so in order to straighten those three things out, we eliminated bathroom passing during academy time.” said Larry Sadd the Business and Culinary Arts Academy Principal.

Another issue is that some students leave just to skip class and end up roaming the hallways.

“A lot of the students are abusing the leniency of our teachers during academy time. It’s only a 40 minute period, and so they are asking for a restroom pass and then they are gone more than a third of the class.” said Ramsey, the Fine Arts Communications Academy Principal. 

With the situations faculty has had to deal with, students had their bathroom pass privileges taken away during this class period, some of these situations have made it quite difficult for the custodians. The custodians are the ones who have to take care of keeping our school clean and so they usually have a lot to do.

“They think they can just tag everywhere they want to, which makes it harder for us custodians, because we have to shut down restrooms, go clean it, then go shut down another restroom and go clean it. Then it pulls us back from other jobs that we gotta do.” custodian Delma Rodriguez said. 

Although students aren’t allowed to go to the restroom during this period they’re still grateful for being able to use the restroom at all.

“At least the teachers are letting us use the restroom and when they do, you shouldn’t vandalize it.”said Zyler Baughn.

Some students seem to think that those who do take advantage of being able to go the restroom are immature, it has also been said that students won’t really care about the rule.

“There’s really no reason to stop students from going to the bathroom and even if they don’t want to be in class, they’ll still leave anyways, so what’s the point of just taking away everybody’s Academy Time bathrooms if everybody is just going to do the same thing and leave anyway.” said Ramiro Peruz.