After a month of mischief from the students at many high schools, Sierra Pacific High School had enough and implemented a new schedule for going to the restroom. This policy was out in place after multiple cases of students destroying bathrooms and or stealing rolls to sensor front the bathroom devices. After the school figured out that this was not caused by rebellious students but was due to a popular social media trend on TikTok the school put bans and regulations to prevent these trends to occur at our schools.
Kaiden Brown, a senior at Sierra Pacific High, stated that “leaving your phone in class is a bit overwhelming but I can see why”. He mentioned that it was a good way to keep people out of the bathroom and keep it more fluid and efficient since they wanted to get back to their phone as fast as possible.
Another student Jose Manuel Magana, who’s also a senior also from Sierra stated that “I hate the new policy since it prevents students from going to the restroom during lunch or break which is when we have more time.¨ Most students who study and pay attention in class tend to not use the restroom during class time so they would prefer to go during break. But due to the new policy many are almost forced to go during class. Manuel Magana stated that he is annoyed that we must miss class time to use the restroom.
The bathroom policy is still in place after the trend first went viral back in September that caused all the misuse of the bathrooms and school equipment. In other schools such as Hanford West High School they also had the same rules implemented but have had the restrictions lossend. They are now allowed to go to the restroom with their phones but must still abide by the 10 minute rule.
Brown also went on to state that he is neutral on the rule but feels that it should be temporarily in place considering how social media has an important influence on the youth and that they will soon forget this phase in their lives. There have been many trends that have come and gone from the bean boozled challenge to invisible box challenge though they weren’t of the same impact. Unlike past trends this one was a sevior one this trend made people go and serve time due to the acts considered being vandalism and theft against the school.
Manuel Magana went on to state ¨I really don’t see any common sense for getting rid of the phones, and having to write your name on a sheet so they know you went to the restroom. Manuel Magana also questioned the effectiveness of having multiple names on a paper and the school’s strategy on actually finding the people who vandalised the restrooms. With this in mind the question of how to actually find the people arises. Calling up everyone who went to the bathroom on that day would not be efficient and just disturb class time and ultimately waste both staff and students time.
Manuel Magana also stated ¨No it shouldn’t apply to everyone, like those students in honor classes since it’s almost guaranteed that those students won’t be committing any type of crime in the restroom since they wouldn’t want to have a bad reputation.¨ The main culprits towards the destruction of the restrooms and theft were the freshmen.
Both Brown and Manuel Magana were in agreement that the rules that are in place are acceptable but should not be an active rule for the whole year; it was just a trend that will and has passed like others.