Why are school bathrooms the target of so much vandalism?

This school year, in addition to keeping schools open during a pandemic, teachers and administrators have had to combat the “devious licks” challenge on TikTok, where students steal or vandalize property at school. Interestingly, most of the occurrences of the challenge have been in school bathrooms, where students have pulled sinks off walls, upended toilets from the floor, and smashed mirrors into shards. Those familiar with American public schools, though, are hardly surprised—bathrooms are notoriously ground zero for devious behavior. But why is this necessarily the case? Restaurants or theatres or ballparks don’t typically have to worry about their bathrooms being destroyed, or people making out in the bathrooms (gross), or people smoking in the bathroom. So why is it the case that bathrooms, specifically, are the location of so much bad behavior on school campuses?

School bathrooms are a peculiar institution. They are perhaps the only public places in schools and in society where teenagers are assuredly free from adults; many teachers fear going into school bathrooms, both for their health and for others’ perception. But nowhere else in society do teenagers and adults use different public bathrooms—stadiums, restaurants, amusement parks, churches, and summer camps all have bathrooms without age segregation. School bathrooms, themselves, become age-integrated during non-school hours; parents visiting a school for a play or a basketball game end up using the student bathrooms, which are typically more accessible than faculty bathrooms.

This adult-free sanctuary lends itself perfectly to teenagers who want to use bathrooms as a place to do anything that adults might not approve of in school—such as vandalism (or vaping). So why do adults and students use different bathrooms in schools in the first place?

Schools have not always had separate bathrooms for adults and students. Schools have not always had bathrooms at all. In 1844, for example, a survey in New York of 9,300 schoolhouses found that about two-thirds of them had no lavatories. This was the time of the “common school”—the first movement in the US to seek to provide basic schooling for all. It also coincided with the invention of flushing toilets and running water. So, in an era where toilets themselves were hard to come by, it is no surprise, then, that when toilets did exist, adults and children were using the same facilities.

In the late 1800s and early 1900s, the social movements collided in school architecture. A rising concern for public health, the study of psychology that created the belief that children and adults are fundamentally different, and an obsession with standardization, measurement, and efficiency characteristic of the Progressive Era all impacted how school bathrooms were designed. These movements also coincided with an increase of urban populations (and especially immigrants) and of the increased importance of the state. What better way to inspire awe of the state than to build beautiful school buildings with the latest technology? As schools became larger, the demand for scientific management techniques increased. Schools were not just for teaching math and history—they were for efficiently acculturating the masses to American life, especially for immigrants in large cities. But in small schools across the western world, students and teachers continued to use the same bathrooms (as there might have only been one or two). 

Evelith (1870) – School House Architecture

A small schoolhouse with plumbing – one single bathroom with two WCs

As schools got bigger, more bathrooms were built, and architects became concerned with how to most efficiently design the school, scientifically studying every element—down to the number of urinals versus toilets per child. British architect Felix Clay writes in 1906:

It should be borne in mind that the urinal is the really important part of the boys’ offices. The closets [commodes], it will often be found, will not be used perhaps once a week, so that, while the number of these is not a matter of very great importance, there should be an ample supply of urinal accommodation.

Felix Clay (1906)

The basement of a school building, with a bathing pool.

 Starting in the late 1800s, large high schools had large bathroom facilities in the basements, replete with showers and sometimes a pool (see picture above). The pools were not used for just recreation but also for hygiene. Clay, quoting an American official, expresses perfectly the ways in which early school bathrooms were quite deliberately used to mold and manipulate the urban poor into something the Progressives found suitable:

The school baths established and projected in this country are for the purpose of educating certain portions of the community in bodily cleanliness. That there is such need of such education in certain parts of our cities cannot be denied. In crowded quarters, under the pressure of hard conditions and surroundings, personal cleanliness gradually becomes neglected, habits of uncleanliness are formed, and moral deterioration surely follows….A child, it is found, has much more respect for himself when clean, and is much more responsive to law and order, and a positive moral influence is exerted upon the parents and home of the children.

In some instances, the school bathing facilities weren’t just for students—they were a public health staple of the community. Clay says: “[T]he building is fitted with ranges of shower-baths that can be used by children from the neighboring Elementary Schools, and also by the general public.” Clay also writes that “systematically washing all the children in the Elementary Schools once a week” is “becoming more and more the custom in Germany and America, where in the more recently built schools very elaborate arrangements are made for this purpose”

Clay (1906)

Elementary school with lots of shower-baths

So, one of the early incentives for schools to have separate bathrooms for students and teachers was that the school bathrooms were, specifically for a public hygiene purpose (and, indeed, the bathroom facilities were used by the general public as well as students), whereas the teachers’ bathrooms were more like an employee’s bathroom. Perhaps there was a class element, as well—teachers would have been ostensibly middle class, whereas the students in many of the big cities where large high schools existed would have been from working class immigrant families.  

Clay (1906)

Boys and girls WC’s—and play rooms—located in the basement

School architects, however, were also worried about the safety of children—not that they might be assaulted by an adult teacher, but that they might be infected. John Joseph Donovan helped to document much of the changes happening in American school architecture. Donovan was born in Massachusetts in 1876. Before he attended MIT to study architecture, he started off as a bricklayer on a project at the prestigious Phillips Academy, piquing his interest in school architecture. Using his study of the history of school architecture, he went on to design many school buildings in Oakland, California—some of which are still in use today, and some of which surely have bathrooms that are still being vandalized by wayward students today. Donovan writes:

[A]dults should never be permitted to use the children’s toilets, nor should the children be permitted to use the toilets assigned to the older people. Each should have separate toilet and dressing rooms. The same is true of shower rooms. Carelessness in regard to this may lead to a serious infection of an innocent child, a thing which can be easily avoided….The danger of infection from toilet seats in schools is practically nil, but this fact should not be made an excuse for not cleaning them frequently.

Donovan (1920) – Teachers and Principals with a separate bathroom, for a “medium sized high school”

 Schools were also an important façade of the local community—they were one of the few government institutions that everyone interacted with, and in the early 1900s, schools were of formidable design. Thus, people stepping into, say, the principal’s office were supposed to be awed by the facilities: “Provision should be made for a lavatory and toilet directly off the office. The principal’s room should be made as attractive as possible, not merely for the satisfaction of the principal herself, but for the wholesome effect will have on teachers, pupils, and patrons” (Donovan 1921).

 ****

Separate student bathrooms came during a time when schools were undertaking a massive endeavor, with new state apparatuses—educating large numbers of students while also promoting public health. Today, schools can be so much more; we shouldn’t have to worry about the efficiency of students’ bowel movements in schools, or whether or not a passerby will be awestruck by the teachers’ private bathrooms. We also ought to be acculturating students to much more than just obedience and factory-style work. We have come a long way over the last 120 years in our expectations of how to be treated at our jobs—and our need to go to the bathroom. These beliefs ought to trickle down to students’ bathroom experiences.

Then, like now, the separation of adult and student bathrooms signaled a hierarchy that students were to learn. Just as a management in a factory might have separate facilities from those working on the factory floor, teachers have had separate bathrooms from their students. Students are taught not to become peers with teachers, but to instead fear and revere them. Teachers are taught not to view children’s basic health functions as necessary but, rather, as an inconvenience to the learning process—one that must be heavily monitored. Students learn to put up with this micromanagement by teachers so that it will seem normal when they have to pee into a bottle while working at an Amazon warehouse, lest they get penalized for  “time off task.”

And because adults—the people who make decisions in schools—don’t have to use student bathrooms, there isn’t an incentive to make sure they stay clean throughout the day. While school bathroom originally served a public health purpose, today, they are oftentimes far from sanitary. A CNN study found than at least one-third of the country’s 900,000 public school bathrooms are unsanitary, an a Bradley Corporation survey found that two-thirds of students say restrooms are poorly maintained. This becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy: dirty bathrooms encourage students to continue to devalue them.

Schools run the gambit in terms of responses to student bathroom vandalism: leaving the doors to bathrooms open; limiting the number of students in a bathroom at a time; having students sign in with a bathroom monitor to use a bathroom. At the first school I worked, the principal, in an effort to stymie bathroom vandalism, temporarily set up his office in the boys’ bathroom.

But these are all band-aids on a systemic problem. A systemic problem requires a systemic solution. Would schools be better off getting rid of the artificial student/teacher bathroom delineation and instead making all bathrooms…bathrooms? The idea of a “student bathroom” is an invention only a little over 100 years old, and it was borne of purposes that typically don’t concern schools anymore. Would getting rid of the mystique around student bathrooms eliminate bad bathroom behavior?