Holding his pass, the student reaches for the door handle of the bathroom and tests the door, already knowing what awaits him. Nothing. Just like the others, he begins to shuffle toward the only bathrooms left. 

Though safety is a large concern and motivator behind the recent decisions regarding closing the bathrooms, the way it has been implemented has caused more problems than it has solved. 

One of the primary concerns with the new bathroom rules is overcrowding. Due to the size of the student body, bathrooms have always been crowded and the new rules have only worsened this issue. Bathrooms that once had two or three students in them now have far more, with up to ten or more students filling one bathroom. This results in cramped conditions and can cause students to wait longer to get back to class.

This overcrowding leads to another problem: the bathrooms are quickly becoming unsanitary. The bathroom infrastructure is more than twenty years old and unused to the amount of people passing through and using it. This leads to clogs and incidents where full toilets dump their contents on the floor. It doesn’t help that the supplies used to clean oneself, namely soap and paper towels, seem to always be completely used up.