PROM 2022: A Night in Vegas

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.”

“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 “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.”

Prom 2022: A Night in Vegas, City of Gold

E-learning advisor and Prom Committee chair Kimberly Nelson graduated from Durham High School, now DSA, in 1987.

“I went to senior prom in a dress made by a seamstress,” Nelson said. “It was royal blue and black with lace gloves.”

The dress was so jaw-droppingly stunning that in nearly every picture her mother took, her head had been cut off.

“It was at the Marriott and the food was just cheese and crackers,” Nelson explained. How absolutely delectable! “Times have really changed.”

“The guy I went with and I didn’t get along,” Nelson said, so she dropped him off at home before staying out until 2:30 am.

Lessons from the Past:

Teachers Share Their Prom Stories

Spanish teacher Ana Kistler attended prom in 1983 dressed in a poofy, lemon yellow gown.

“I wore a typical 80’s dress,” Kistler said. “It was the era of Princess Diana’s wedding gown.”

She topped off the look with iridescent lipstick. Classy.

Back then, Kistler noted, the dance was more of a partner thing, and people attended with dates. Kistler was accompanied by a good friend.

“He was actually homosexual,” she said.

The problem was prom took place the day before the SAT.

“Nobody really stressed the importance of the test, so we all showed up exhausted after prom,” Kistler said.

Environmental Science teacher Shaun Thompson attended his prom with his toxic high school girlfriend, Nicole.

“All my friends hated her because she was an awful girlfriend,” Thompson said. “She was manipulative and drove a wedge between me and one of my close female friends.”

His friends even excluded him from the limousine on the way to the dance because they disliked her so much.

“That stung,” he recalled.

He advises that if all your friends hate your significant other, it probably isn’t a relationship you should be in.

Thompson is engaged to be married this spring, and fortunately Nicole will not be in attendance.

Prom was a big deal for biology teacher Mika Tweitmeyer. And not only because of the opulence.

All 900 students in her grade enjoyed a live band, three separate dinner seatings, a DJ, a hypnotist show, and water fountains filled with fish.

“John Mayer played at my brother’s prom,” Tweitmeyer said.

These festivities began on their way to the dance.

“The big thing was how you got to prom,” Twietmeyer said. “There was a red carpet, risers for the parents.”

Students pulled up in a variety of comical entrances ranging from horse-drawn carriages to ice cream trucks, from bulldozers to trolleys.

Despite this, the most important part of her prom was her date. She was accompanied by her now-husband, Jon. Twietmeyer.

“We dated in high school, then broke up when we were in college, I got married to someone else, and then we later found each other, decades later, and got married.”

If we can learn anything from Twietmeyer, take your date screening seriously, because instead of walking down the red carpet, you could be walking down the aisle. Keep your standards high!

Theater arts teacher Monique Taylor was not like other girls; she never attended prom.

“We were too cool to go to prom,” Taylor said. “So we went to a nightclub instead.”

She was accompanied by her friend and their dates.

This choice left a void in Taylor’s life, that she has attempted to remedy through volunteering on the prom committee to organize prom for three years.

“I kind of used it to fill in the hole for me,” Taylor said.

English teacher Mary Foster has served as prom chaperone numerous times over her 23 year long career at Riverside. She describes this experience as both lovely and disturbing. “Besides the children trying to have sex with their clothes on it’s always lovely,” Foster said. “It’s amazing to me how beautiful the ladies are, and then they’re humping all over someone.”

Foster echoes the same sentiment of many other teachers: that it is so striking to see their students dressed up and in a non-academic setting.

“I see my serious, good students dressed up like princesses,” Foster said. “And then I see them on the dance floor and I think, ‘does your father know what you're doing on the dance floor? Because if so, I bet he’d beat you and kill that boy.’” No one knows how to party like the chorus kids.

Conner Bolen and Anna Allman attended Riverside prom with their Chorus friends. After a fancy Italian dinner and a picture taking session down by the Eno, they danced the night away.

But the real capstone of the event was the after party.

“We went and watched Les Mis in somebody's basement,” he said.

So if you’re short on afterparty ideas, consider Bolen’s example of singing along to a basement musical extravaganza.