Out of all of the bathrooms in PIHS, the sophomore hall bathroom lately has the reputation as being the most problematic. Something had to be done about it. The girls and boys bathrooms in sophomore hall have been closed, but will reopen Monday, May 22. When these bathrooms reopen, there will be a note warning that if these bathrooms aren’t used responsibly, they will be closed for the rest of the year.  The cause? People using the bathroom as playgrounds. Students reportedly have written on the walls, pulled the paint off, sat on sinks and made a mess. For more than a week these bathrooms were shut down due to students’ behaviors. Even though there are students who just use the bathrooms as bathrooms, they still have had to face the consequences of others’ actions. 

“We’ve just had a lot of groups of students hanging out there during class time,” assistant principal Joe Greaves said. “To keep these bathrooms open, students must use them responsibly. It’s not a place to hang out. We only want a few students in there at a time which will be hard to do.” Keeping a limit to bathrooms is difficult due to the fact that other teachers don’t know when other classrooms are allowing students to go. “Next year’s bathroom accessibility will start as usual in hopes that students will use them responsibly and don’t take advantage of bathrooms,” Greaves said.

“I guess if I were in charge I would try to fix them kind of fast so that people wouldn’t have to walk all the way downstairs and miss some important topics in class while they’re in  the bathroom,” Aubrey Woodman ’26 said. “I guess it would depend on where the classroom is,” Woodman added when asked if it was harder to get to certain classes due to the bathrooms being shut down. 

“Bathrooms are there for a reason, they’re not supposed to be used for skipping or to vape in,” Kaeleigh Swanson ’26 said. “Why would you want to go hang out in a bathroom, of all places?”