In theory, a group of people nearing adulthood should be able to keep a bathroom clean. All one does is go in, sit or stand, go, wash their hands, dry, and leave. Yet, according to a survey by the Bradley Corporation, the vast majority of students believe school bathrooms are below par. 

Frankly, it’s not hard to see why. When one enters a public school bathroom, they may encounter sinks piled with soggy paper towels, a mysterious liquid coating the floor that one can only pray is water, the unfortunate objects left by people who simply refuse to flush, whether yellow or brown, and oodles of purposeful vandalism: crude graffiti, food from pre or post digestion, and possibly more.

These rather disgusting environments can plague school bathrooms everywhere, and AGHS is no exception. Plenty of students have their own tales of misfortune in the bathroom. For many students, their main problem with the bathrooms is the cleanliness. Walking into the bathrooms is a gamble that can end in stained shoes, rancid smells, or putrid sights.

Student stories surrounding unfavorable experiences in the bathroom float around campus. Sienna Castilleja (‘27) was a student who experienced a particularly horrifying event.

“On the door [in the girls’ bathroom] there was period blood and someone wrote redrum, like in the movie ‘The Shining’ and I know it was period blood because there was an open bloody pad,” Castilleja said. She had one question for the offending party: “Why? Just why?”

Kaliana Diaz (‘25) claimed to have found a “shit bucket” in the girls bathroom, while Jazmine Luis Sarabia (‘26) and Anika Messineo (‘27) both reported fecal matter smeared around stalls.

These specific instances are particularly bad, but even on a day-to-day basis, students describe the bathrooms unfavorably, noting urine coating the floors, paper towels piled into sinks, and general misuse of the appliances.

The disgusting state of the bathrooms isn’t the only problem students encounter. According to the National Institute of Health, in 2024, 21.0% of 12th graders and 15.4% of 10th graders reported vaping nicotine in the past 12 months. Furthermore, 11.6% of 10th graders and 17.6% of 12th graders reported vaping cannabis within the past 12 months. 

“Before they [added] the vape detectors, it was really bad,” Joy Avant (‘25) said. “Every time I went into the bathroom, there was like a group of people in the stalls either vaping or [smoking weed] ”

The addition of vape detectors makes smoking in bathrooms more risky, and it’s definitely had a noticeable effect.

“When they first got the vape detectors, so many people were getting caught vaping in the bathroom just because they didn’t believe that it worked,” Avant said, but claimed that after a while, the amount of vaping or drug usage she witnessed in the bathrooms had a steep decline.

The problems with the bathrooms don’t end at their cleanliness issues or drug use. Another large problem that students commonly encounter in the bathrooms is their destruction. It’s not uncommon to walk into a bathroom to see sinks covered with a garbage bag or a broken trash can.

This destruction of school property really began in September of 2021,with the infamous TikTok trend known as “devious licks” becoming popularized and leading to multiple arrests. Reports of arrests in Texas, Florida, Georgia, and other states have been linked to the trend, and AGHS was one of the many that felt the effects.

One instance of this trend took place during the 2021-2022 school year when an entire bathroom in the agricultural department of the school was stolen.

“I walked into the bathroom in the AG area, and the bathroom was gone,” Sebastian Barbir (‘25) said. “There were just blank walls and pipes.”

A similar event happened to Jonothan Bevan (‘26) but in a more unfortunate way.

“I was in the bathroom, doing my business, and then people started taking the door off the hinges, like they brought a whole tool kit in and just started dismantling the stall,” Bevan said.

At the very least, the offending party had some decency. After Bevan spoke up, they put the door back, waited for him to be done, and took it right back off its hinges and out of the bathroom. Where they went with the bathroom door after its theft and how they got it off campus, one may never know.

While such extreme cases are few and far between, the stealing, vandalizing, or breaking of minor appliances still occurs frequently at AGHS.

“One bad experience I had was I tried to flush a urinal and the whole bathroom started to flood,” Bayan Wentzel (‘25) said.

These issues are all too prevalent at AGHS, and while some aspects are improving, there is still a long way to go before the bathrooms can be considered up to par. However, fixing this problem is an uphill battle, and students have mixed views on where to place the blame.

Unlike many school districts in the state of California, LMUSD has no policy relating to the sanitation of bathrooms, it is thus up to custodial staff.

“I assume they clean [the bathrooms] around twice a week,” Bevan said.Students have many assumptions about the bathroom cleaning schedule, however, many students feel the mess made simply cannot be kept up with in any meaningful way.

“I think it lies on the students because you can’t really do anything to stop kids in the bathroom,” Wentzel said. “Starting fight clubs, vaping, breaking urinals over and over again, stealing stuff, and pooping on the floor is all the students’ fault.”

The Bradley Study found that 81% of students use their school restrooms daily. Other studies have found that most students use the bathroom one to two times at school, and at AGHS, there are around two thousand students. This means that if our school follows this trend, the bathrooms around campus are used approximately 2,400 times over a school day by a total of about 1,600 students, and the main brunt of this comes from only 2 restrooms for most of the day. 

With so many students using the bathrooms, having a smaller group of janitorial staff could cause trouble keeping up with the constant filth.

Some ways in which the custodial staff are countering the mess are by having supervisors posted outside of restrooms to monitor students. The monitors let two students in at a time for the boys restroom to narrow down the culprits in the event of a vape detector activation, as well as act as eyes and ears in the case of vandalism. Although this method only started a few weeks ago, it has seen early success.

“The vapes have gone down, and the overall appearance of the bathroom is better,” campus supervisor Martin Cano said. “At the end of the day, kids are not destroying it.”

The bathrooms are often a mess, filled with nauseating sights and smells, vandalized, or destroyed. Many students blame the faculty for these messes, and while it’s easy to point fingers, the limited staff AGHS has are doing all they can to counter the constantly piling mess of filth from thousands of students. Students should help reduce the mess by helping keep the bathrooms clean.