School bathroom design and protocols reflect changing priorities | News
Bullying, body-shaming, drug culture and truancy—these issues have long been the bane of high schoolers’ experiences.
Yet White Bear Lake Area High School (WBLAHS) has seen a 50% reduction in fights, 90% reduction in chemical abuse, and near 100% reduction in graffiti and vandalism.
And though the state of Minnesota reports that 71% of schools have a chronic absentee issue, White Bear’s period attendance—meaning a student who enters the building misses no more than 10 minutes of a class—has climbed to 89%. The other 11%, explained WBLAHS Principal Russ Reetz, is largely due to late arrivals or early leave. How did the district accomplish this? It targeted bathrooms and bathroom breaks.
Visible sink bays, privacy bathrooms
“Everybody prefers a more private bathroom,” said Architect Sal Bagley of Wold Architects, who designed White Bear’s “privacy bathrooms.” These restrooms have a common sink bay ringed by a semicircle of single-person stalls with floor-to-ceiling doors with an “occupied” or “available” lock, much like the ones on airplanes.
“I’ve never met somebody who says, ‘I hope someone can see me through the gaps in the stall.’”
Because the sink bay is visible from the hall, school security can monitor the common area, easily spotting if more than one student enters a single stall at the same time or if a user has been inside for a concerning amount of time. “A lot of unwanted behaviors happened in a bathroom because there’s less supervision,” said Reetz, “and we just don’t have those issues anymore.”
Such a design also removes the need to separate bathrooms by gender. While Bagley said that gender-neutrality is an issue that privacy bathrooms happen to address, the design’s aim deals with much broader concerns. “For some people, it’s as simple as, ‘I’m uncomfortable going to the bathroom anywhere where anyone can hear me.’ … And for some people, it’s ‘I hate that the bathrooms are a gathering space for vaping,’” she said.
Reetz thinks this type of design is indicative of a larger societal shift: White Bear is not the first school district to come up with this solution. St. Paul’s and Stillwater’s districts installed similar setups years earlier.
New solutions, however, can create new problems. One issue privacy bathroom stalls initially faced was cleanliness. “We are learning some basic norms and responsibilities for those shared spaces …” said Reetz. “Our students are really doing a good job in treating them well.”
Bagley added, “I think that it’s an expectation as a member of society that we teach people how we treat space.”
Bagley believes that increased cleaning needs are a positive thing. “Some of that might be because they’re so popular. If our biggest problem is that this meets so many people’s demands that we have to clean them more, I actually think that means the right thing has been done.”
Enter the digital hall pass
As Reetz was preparing to become principal in 2023, he learned of Minnesota’s increasing student-absence problem. “When students go to class, they’re leaving on a pass and not returning, or they are gone for far too long …” he explained. “We have got to find a way to keep our kids going to class and hold them accountable when they are not.”
This past fall, the high school implemented a “digital hall pass” system to account for the whereabouts of every student if they are not in class. To use the bathroom, a student logs into the app and selects which bathroom they are visiting. “(The) digital pass has provided us with an opportunity to limit where you can be in the building and for how long you can be out,” described Reetz. “We also have access to who can be out at the same time.”
While the digital hall pass has helped increase attendance, some students believe the system is flawed.
“I understand why they are doing it,” said senior Maria Kimlinger. “But as a student, it almost feels a little inhumane that I’m 18 years old and I’m an adult, and I still have to ask to go to the bathroom. And they need to track how long I’m going to the bathroom.”
Senior Cole Morin stated that the system is impractical and distracting. “My teachers don’t really like the hall pass thing because they don’t like having to go to the computer and approve it and then let you go,” he explained.
Reetz explained that the district is not necessarily watching every minute that passes when a student leaves the classroom but is instead watching for trends.
“When they return, they return. It’s more so if we have an issue down the road; we look back and say, ‘Okay, you’ve been out eight times for 16 minutes each time. We’re looking for patterns and trends. We’re not necessarily using the data. It’s not a ‘gotcha.’”
Reetz acknowledged that the digital hall pass has not had a perfect rollout. The clunkiness, he explained, is because the app was designed for smartphones, and the high school integrated it before Minnesota required stricter cell phone policies for students. As a result, Reetz said the administration is granting flexibility to teachers for the remainder of the year.
Next year, Reetz hopes to implement a system in which a student who needs a hall pass would simply tap their student ID on a kiosk and go. When told about the system, both Kimlinger and Morin agreed that such a system would be simpler and less disruptive.
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