The girls bathrooms are easily the most disgusting restrooms I’ve ever been in.

Feminine products are crammed into the metal wastebaskets—sometimes overflowing onto the floor. Stalls without locks are another unpleasant ordeal that test the patience of the lines of girls waiting to use a bathroom, despite there being only a few stalls that genuinely work.

The repulsion I felt upon entering the bathroom for the first time was instantaneous: it smelled. It was dirty. It was crowded.

Soap and toilet paper are limited as a result of the masses of girls using that bathroom everyday. The sinks are also frustrating—I’m forced to alternate my hands pushing on the nozzles so that they won’t turn off randomly while washing my hands. Miscellaneous bags of chips and bottles of Deer Park water frame the hair-encrusted drain. The stench of the bathroom is unavoidable and palpable; the mix of an array of perfumes is quite intense and disgusting. Occasionally, ripped open condoms accompany the aforementioned chips and water which creates a very uninviting environment to wash your hands.

There is no trash can which for some reason motivates our peers to leave their random trash anywhere they please—the floor, the sinks, the toilet, and just about any other place you could think of. Flushing the toilets is something we all should have learned at a young age. The keyword there is ‘should have,’ because it’s abundantly clear that this idea was not extended to everyone. This is also odd considering that the toilets are supposed to flush automatically. There are also the infamous toilets encased in a black trash bag; this to me is awkward and confusing. Rather than solving the problem of the broken toilets, it seemed like they just wanted to hide the problem by throwing a bag over the toilets. As a result, the stalls are avoided because the presence of the black trash bag remains a mystery to all.

Messy and smelly; the boys bathroom is an equally awful experience. “The toilets aren’t usually flushed, and it usually smells like weed,” freshman Mattias Rolett said.

This is verdict is common among the boys regarding their grimy and disgusting bathrooms. “It’s really nasty. Doors are broken, the windows are drawn on, the sinks are messed up. In the sinks, there is random stuff and food,” sophomore Kevin Ruiz said.

The custodians clean the bathroom every single day, it’s our responsibility to maintain the cleanliness by not leaving our trash everywhere, having students monitor the bathrooms before and after school, and as a school, putting trash cans in the restroom rather than leaving it anywhere and making it a disgusting experience. We are just as responsible for maintaining the school’s cleanliness as the custodial staff is, we must respect our environment and try to keep it clean rather than worsen the experience for everyone.