Destruction of the Gloucester High School Restrooms

The first thing you notice when you walk into the boys D-hall or A-hall restrooms is the horrid smell. Within a few seconds of being in there, you are gasping for air, and your eyes begin to water. The sharp acrid odor overwhelms all your senses and when you are in there, you are sitting there wondering how something could be this bad.

“There are some teenagers that do not know how to act, and sometimes they get pressured to do things.” Said Chief Williams, the Naval Science instructor. One other thing we want to point out is how there are only two to three janitors during the school day so it puts a lot of pressure on them. They do the best they can to remove the destruction”,” but there is only so much they can do. A large number of the students destroy the restrooms not knowing how much they would cost to fix. Mr. Foster, one of the assistant principals, said it would cost somewhere between fifteen to twenty thousand dollars.

“The students think it is funny.” This quote we got from Jaden 10th grade, James Anderson 10th, Ryan Carpenter 10th, and Ryan Harris 10th. We asked the students several questions. One of them was why do they think some of the students destroy the restrooms, and they said several different answers. The answers varied such as, they are bored, they wanted to show off how strong they are, they are immature and do not know how to act, and they were pressured into destroying the restrooms.

Some expressed their opinions of what destroying the restrooms does to them and they said, “ they do not have respect for other people who use the restrooms.”
There were many ideas given on how to fix the problem. One of them was to start a program where if the student gets caught destroying the restrooms, they go around with the janitors and help them clean up the school as a type of punishment. There has been a large number of students caught for vaping in the restroom but not one for vandalism.
Given all of this information, vandalism in the school has become a growing problem which needs to be resolved quickly.