Picture this: you just took a mentally-depriving math exam, leaving you devoid of all feeling in your fingertips with three dull number 2 pencils in your backpack and dim hopes of at least an 80% in the grade book. All you have to do is FINALLY use the restroom during the passing period.

But you can’t, because some students before you had the same idea, except their bathroom activities included vaping, fist-fighting each other, and of course, getting worried administrators involved in what should have been your quick, stress-relieving bathroom break. On top of the stress of your math test, you can’t even lay eyes upon the porcelain that so often provides you comfort.

This story may sound odd to those who have never braved the bathrooms at the prime times for vapers. A bathroom is meant to serve the purpose of bowel relief, and yet, it rarely serves a purpose other than inducing more stress.

One often cannot find peace and quiet in a school restroom. Whether the entry of another student or the sounds of illicit activity are interrupting your bathroom break, there is rarely a calm moment in the bathrooms of MN.

As a student there are multiple reasons to enter the bathroom, usually boiling down to hair checks, hand washing, and plain-old numbers one or two. It is the odd ones out that ruin the bathroom experience for us all.

According to assistant principal Matt Starks, many students choose the bathrooms for their mischief, with a false sense of security to be had in an unsupervised area. “There’s an added level of comfort if these students are in the bathroom and they think they can get away with it,” Starks said.

When walking into a high school bathroom, there are a multitude of possible activities that are going on. Whether there’s a line out the door for the stalls available, a student out front guarding the door for a group of fighting delinquents, or an entire friend group hanging out inside, high school bathrooms are a force to be reckoned with.

Are these bathrooms with ambient toilet-flushing noises really worthy of hosting your conversations? Can you even communicate the necessary gossip in such a smelly area? The students of MN need to band together and find better locations for these discussions. People hanging around the bathrooms at MN cause so much unnecessary discomfort in an already-bothersome space, so it is important that we can open these bathrooms up for comfort and not for delinquency and further policing.   

“If there is excessive noise or an issue that we’ve been alerted to, we respond quickly to the bathrooms,” Starks said. “Our security guards can poke their heads in to look for prohibited items and make sure there’s not more than one student in each stall.”

The worst part of this silent war between constipated students and outhouse dwellers is the discomfort the bathroom experience provides, with the threat of administrative action affecting even the well-intentioned students.

It is often that, when walking the halls, you might see students speed-walk out of a bathroom seconds after peering inside, and that’s only because of the smell half of the time. The bathrooms make students fear not for the status of the toilet, but for their school records instead. A large group of students passing a vape under the stalls can mean bad things for the students in the same bathroom, minding their own business. This scenario, luckily, doesn’t happen often, but the possibility can be scary enough to deter many of the bravest students from trying their hands at bathroom breaks.

This constant deterrence of other students means that more and more bathrooms aren’t used for their real purpose. Crowds of students stand against the walls, and whether a vape is passed around or not, the intimidation of seeing six guys just standing around the sinks can easily make things awkward enough to rid one of any bowel pressure that incited the need for a bathroom break in the first place.

Oh well, right? The bathrooms can just be hangout spots for delinquency and the rest of us are just going to be fine with it. I mean, I didn’t really need to use the bathroom anyway, I just felt like popping in at 8 in the morning to check the status of the friend groups that gab about their mornings in the bathroom, perhaps even catching them plotting their latest soap-throwing  and vape-hitting acts of defiance.