Kara Adkins

Staff Writer

Walking into one of the school restrooms is similar to walking onto a crime scene: the smell is overwhelming and you always fear what is lingering behind closed doors.

Indeed, Coppell High School’s restrooms do not necessarily reflect a tradition of excellence and high standards when it comes to the quality of our campus. The students at CHS have definitely noticed the conditions of the restrooms, yet still the state of these facilities remains the same.

“[The bathrooms] are pretty nasty, there is pee on the floor and there is toilet paper all over the place and people don’t flush the toilets, it’s just gross; they need to be better kept up,” sophomore Blake Warren said.

Yet, it does not seem to be a janitorial issue at hand. The custodians at Coppell do the best they can to keep our campus squeaky clean. It comes down to the students respect to school restrooms as well as the funds  the school has to keep the toilets, doors and sinks repaired.

“The school really needs to do something about it. Since none of the teachers really use them and they try to avoid these restrooms, they don’t really care about them,” junior Shelby Spring said.

Since students are the only ones who regularly use these restrooms, school officials often times don’t know the repairs and maintenance that need to be done to them. During a walk through of the school, out of 9 restrooms, 14 of the door locks didn’t work on the stalls and there were 16 maintenance issues when it came down to the toilets, sinks, and dryers.

“We do walk throughs but most of those are about the cleanliness of the building, it may be a good suggestion to do maintenance walk throughs. I think they are checked time to time. If one isn’t working and nobody reports it we will never know since we don’t use them.” Assistance Principal Michael Williams said.

Besides the fact the restrooms are dirty, the doors do not lock, and the toilets do not flush; the restrooms also bring a bad image to the school with the phrases written on many of the stall doors.

“They are dirty and they have very absurd and slang terms written in the stalls. People probably think our school is gross and that the kids have no respect,” junior Phillip Ellis said.

Williams admits that he has received a complaint from a visitor about our bathrooms, but the school took measures to make sure they fixed that problem. Since Williams has so many other responsibilities at the school, the cleanliness and maintenance of the bathrooms don’t take top priority on his list of things to do.

“It’s a maintenance deal. It’s not really an assistant principal deal. Facilities is a part of my responsibilities but the maintenance department, our custodian staff, would have to do a walk through on that since I have other responsibilities at the school and of course I cant be walking through girls restrooms in the middle of the day to see if the locks are broken.” Williams said.

Considering that most students can be at the school for up to eight hours a day, it is near impossible to avoid the reluctant trip to visiting the school restroom. But many students believe the least the school could do is make the trip a little bit more pleasant by keeping the restrooms well kept and tidy.

Williams does realize that this is a problem worth addressing at our school and is actively trying to take action to make sure our bathrooms are in better condition for student use.

“We are trying to address the problem because locks and doors happen from day to day,” Williams said. “You can fix it one day then the next it will be broken. With all of the students we have and all of the activities we have at CHS, we are just trying to keep up with all of these things.”

With the reoccurring issues the school restrooms have brought up, the school stresses the importance of reporting these problems in order for change to take place.