By Brady Winkler
At the beginning of the 2024-2025 school year, the WMS administrators put rules in place requiring students to sign out of classrooms and use passes. However, there are still some issues with these rules.
The rules on leaving the room can be a hot topic for some. Misbehavior when leaving has gotten so bad that the school had to temporarily close some restrooms. On one hand, using passes, limiting restroom use to a certain amount per quarter, leads to students spending more time in class, and only leaving the room when it’s necessary. On the other hand, restricting restroom use causes students to ignore their bodies, and with only one or two passes, there can be long wait times to go. Are these rules doing more harm than good? If so, what would be some possible solutions?
Pros
There still are lots of benefits to having this system. For example:
- There is a decrease in students leaving the room when it’s not necessary
- Students are spending more time in class
- Teachers know more about where students are and how much we are leaving the room, making it safer for students
- Students from the same class can’t plan to leave the room simultaneously and hang out in the hallway
Cons
However, there are still many reasons why this system does not work well at everything, like how,
- Students may dismiss what their body needs because they don’t want to use the restroom unnecessarily, even if they do need to go
- Having two passes, and a lot of times only one pass for each room can be hard, especially if the person who went to the restroom before you is taking a long time and you really have to go.
- Students that don’t actually need to leave can go several times a day, and there’s not a very easy way to track it
Solutions
Finding a solution that keeps students in class when they don’t need to leave the room, without discouraging them to leave when needed, can be difficult. However, I’ve proposed a solution that may solve this problem.
Firstly, a sign-in sheet would be added outside the restrooms. It would have the student take note of who they are, and the time and date they are using the restroom, allowing the office to see who is going more than they should. This would work better at keeping track of bathroom usage than having to look through every individual classroom. The sign-out sheet would still exist in classrooms, although this would mainly just give the teacher a way of remembering which student is out.
It still has some downsides. For instance, it would take extra time to both sign out of the room, and then sign in to the restroom. Students could also decide not to sign out. Because there would be no adult watching, they could easily get away with it.
In addition to this, students should not be able to get water during class. In my personal experience, a lot of students leave the room to fill up their water bottle, or get a drink from the fountain. This rule would eliminate lots of time out of class. Unlike using the restroom, most students are able to wait until the next class for water. An exception to this rule would be Wellness classes, where students do need the extra water.
With these rules, progress would be made towards solving the problem of students spending too much time out of class, without discouraging students from leaving when needed.
What do you think?
What I’ve written above is just my opinion. However, I thought it would be great to hear from students outside my grade (7th) and staff members to listen to their ideas. I asked them, “Do you agree with the system we have in place for leaving the room?”
Some of the comments I heard are below.
| “At first, I did not like bathroom passes, but now I think it makes sense, as you know when someone is out if the pass is gone. One flaw with that is that people lose the passes everywhere.” – Natalie, 8th Grader |
| “I do agree with these rules. I feel like without them, kids would just hang out with friends for extended periods of time, but say they were using the restroom. With our current rules, I don’t think that there’s anything discouraging them to leave when it’s needed.” – Alexandra Nugent, 6th Grader |
| “I started a rule in September that you only can leave the room five times per semester. I started it because I felt that people needed to be in the class more and think about whether or not they really needed to be elsewhere or if they should really be in class. I found that when faced with a limited number of times, people realize that they don’t actually need to leave, and stay back in class.” – Mrs. Reed, 7th Grade Teacher |
| Currently, the expectation is that we want students to sign out to use the restroom and get back within 3-5 minutes. However, teachers are allowed to make their own rules, as they know their class the best. We also tell teachers to have two restroom passes, but this can end up becoming one pass with students losing them. I do like your idea of limiting usage per day. However, most teachers can already figure out who is leaving more frequently, and take action accordingly. (Paraphrased from Dr. Romeo’s Interview) |