By Sam Dunbar

I have always found that Memorial High School is a LGBTQIA+ friendly school. MHS has a GSA (Gender and Sexuality Awareness) club, teachers use preferred names and pronouns, and students have access to a few unisex bathrooms throughout the school. 

The issue is, teachers also have access to these bathrooms. Teachers, even though they have access to both the gendered single stall (teacher only) bathrooms, and the multi stall bathrooms that all students have access to, consistently use the student designated unisex/single stall restrooms. For people who don’t feel comfortable in multi-stall bathrooms that are grouped by sex, this can cause issues with either teachers who the students aren’t out to/don’t feel comfortable around, other queer students who need to use the restroom at the same time, or even just the fact that they have to wait that long to gain access to a restroom they are comfortable in.  If we had more single-stall bathrooms in our school, queer kids would have less issues getting access to bathrooms they feel comfortable in, and trips to the bathroom would be able to take less time.

Many students at Memorial High School, both queer and not, say they would feel far more comfortable going to the restrooms at school if they had access to single-stall unisex restrooms. Charlie Daigle, a student here at MHS and a member of GSA, expressed their disapproval of the current bathroom situation. They explained that, though they are glad the bathrooms exist and that they are disability accessible, there are not enough of them available to students. Daigle spoke about how there are only two in the school that student keys can open and how they are clearly the former staff restrooms.

“I’m glad they exist at all, since a lot of places don’t even have non-gendered bathrooms as an option, but it’s so clear that us queer students were just an afterthought,”Daigle said.

Alistor Meyer, another student at MHS, had a similar view. 

“I think people would benefit from having more unisex bathrooms. Just having two is kind of inconvenient, because if there are multiple people that need to use the restroom, we have to wait. By the time I walk to the bathroom, sometimes wait, do my business (so to speak), and walk back to class, it can take up to ten minutes (or more, depending on how long the previous person takes) just to use the bathroom,” Meyer said.

Meyer added that when other people are in the unisex restrooms when you are trying to use them, it can take away from time that could be spent in the classroom, learning. 

Elizabeth Shockman from MPR News writes in her article In St. Paul Schools, Gender-Neutral Bathrooms Have Proven Safer For All Students, “St. Paul school leaders said the number of kids who felt unsafe in restrooms was reduced by more than half when they changed the design to gender-neutral single-stall facilities. There are fewer students smoking in bathrooms, less vandalism, less bullying, fewer lines and more kids washing their hands. When districts around the state were dealing with broken plumbing and soap dispensers from the ‘Devious Licks’ social media trend a few years ago, Johnson Sr. High saw no vandalism.” Having unisex bathrooms made everyone feel safer using the bathroom, and created an environment that prevented the acts of vandalism that other schools across the country had to deal with.

In conclusion, if a staff member decides to use a unisex restroom that is available to students, it isn’t necessarily fair to the students who may only have access to that restroom, whereas teachers tend to have more options. Both of my parents are teachers. I understand and respect the fact that teachers have a very limited time to use the restroom because of the way the schedule is set up, meaning they need to use the bathroom that is nearest to their classroom. However, when teachers have easy access to the single stall restrooms for students and teachers, as well as the multi stall restrooms, they should not penalize the queer students who have to wait for one if they are late or take more than five minutes to use the restroom. But if there were more unisex restrooms throughout the school that the students had access to, it could reduce vandalism of the bathrooms, cut time for the restroom trips, and also make much of the student body feel more comfortable using the restroom at school, which is very important considering we spend much of our lives in this school building.