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May “Personally I feel like we can do better. We’re handling ourselves like we’re middle schoolers. Since we’re high schoolers, we need to be more responsible.” - Freshman Arianna Harrison Fruit thrown on a urinal in the boy's bathroom. Food is often found in the bathroom after SMART lunch.
Brutal, bloody, broken Are Riverside's bathrooms a biohazard?
By Emmer Rice “How do you break a sink? Apparently not by turning it on, because washing your hands in a Riverside bathroom is virtually impossible, since there is no soap.” That’s what Kelvin Allen and Katelyn Johnson had to say about the Riverside's bathrooms. However, they didn’t say it last month, last semester or even last year. Allen and Johnson said it in a Pirates’ Hook issue 17 years ago. Little seems to have changed since 2005. Riverside’s bathrooms are a mess, and no one seems to be cleaning up any time soon. Current student testimonials prove this to be true.
“[Riverside’s] bathrooms are nasty,” said sophomore Nesiya Smith. “They got tissue all over the floor, dumb writing on the walls, leaving pad wrappings on the floor. “Personally I feel like we can do better. We’re handling ourselves like we’re middle schoolers. Since we’re high schoolers, we need to be more responsible.” said freshman Arianna Harrison. According to research conducted by the Pirates’ Hook in March and April, bathrooms are hit or miss. In some bathrooms, every sink works, and in others, none do. While over 95 percent of toilets and urinals work, sinks are considerably less functional. Only 73 percent of the sinks in the men's bathrooms and 67 percent in the women's bathrooms are fully functional.
Essentially, students play a guessing game every time they pick up a bathroom pass. Paper towel dispensers have also fallen victim to the Riverside student body they’re often seen on the floor. Students break the dispensers often, and it can take days or weeks for the replacement parts to arrive. There’s even an Instagram page dedicated to the state of Riverside’s bathrooms. Posts include broken stall doors, videos of students joking in the bathrooms, to an unflushed toilet. With comments ranging from “This is so sad” to “I just vomited from having to look at that,” the page is less of a critique on the bathrooms and more of a platform to make fun of the chaos. Assistant principal Will Okun says students have to be more conscientious. “When the toilet paper is not in the toilet, to me that’s on purpose,” Okun said. “I think students need to be more accountable and treat the bathrooms the way they want them to look.”
(Left) Paper towel holder knocked off the wall. (Center) Missing ceiling tiles in girls' bathroom. (Right) Used feminine napkin on toilet.
“This is the worst.” Bathroom vandalism makes janitors' job even harder By Jada Love and Taliyah Cooper George Pettiford has cleaned a lot of bathrooms, but he’s never seen any as bad as Riverside’s. “Not this bad…this is the worst,” says Pettiford, Riverside’s supervisor of maintenance. Pettiford started doing maintenance work in 2013 and joined Riverside’s janitorial team during the 2018-19 school year. He doesn’t remember the bathrooms being an issue before the pandemic, but when students returned this fall for full-time, in-person instruction, it got much worse. “Broken sinks, a lot of soap dispensers and paper towel dispensers being damaged,” he said. “And it is [my] job to fix it.” As the supervisor of maintenance, Pettiford assigns each member of his staff different areas to work on. His own role is to check around the building and campus to make sure everything looks good. He checks lights, ceiling tiles, and fire extinguishers. Every day he cleans the campus, fields, and has to take out almost 100 trash cans. Keeping the school clean is a full-time job by itself, but he and his staff now spend more time cleaning up after students that are vandalizing the schools bathrooms, too. This is a huge burden for Pettiford and his staff and adds an extra load of work for them. “The time demands are getting back to normal,” he said. Pettiford, who is leaving Riverside for a similar position in Orange County, said cleaning and repairing the bathrooms gets expensive, too. Though the district covers some of the replacement parts, the janitorial team’s already tight budget doesn’t have funds to buy extra supplies. “Getting parts to fix things is not cheap,” he said. And when things break, it can take a while to order the parts they need to replace broken sinks, smashed mirrors and damaged paper towel dispensers. As the school’s janitorial staff continues to fix broken sinks, smashed mirrors, missing ceiling panels and knocked down paper towel holders, Pettiford thinks the rapid decline in the cleanliness of Riverside’s bathrooms is because of a change in student behavior. are rapidly declining and this with the help of Riverside students. “I would say the capacity of students is a huge [factor] of why the bathrooms are the way they are,” said Pettiford, “There are a lot more freshmen this year, which may be a part of the problem.”
