Boys’ restrooms should do more to allow privacy

A boys’ bathroom at SHS looks no different from any other male public restroom; there are urinals, a stall for privacy and sinks to wash hands.

Yet, when entering one of these rooms, there are unused urinals amid students doing their business, and boys generally look up to the ceiling to avoid the discomfort of standing so close to someone with no barrier in between.

Without dividers, the tension between males in a school restroom becomes thick, as they do not have any of privacy. Whenever possible, to minimize discomfort, two males take the the corner urinals and face the corners, never looking down; for five urinals, a third male takes the center urinal and stares straight ahead.

Either way, two urinals in each restroom are often not used. The lack of usable urinals creates lines of males during passing, lunch and break periods, when males frequently relieve themselves, in addition to being a waste of two perfectly good urinals that could be usable with the addition of the kinds of dividers so frequently seen at public places like airports and stadiums.

A cynic might argue that if needed, males can go into a stall to do their business. Yet, those stalls are often too full with boys trying to find privacy in there.

As a result, males often wait in lines to use the stalls and the occupied urinals, making the entire restroom routine incredibly time-consuming and inconvenient.

This story is all about a topic none of us talk about, but all of us know about. Dividers should be built between urinals to preserve the privacy that all males deserve.