Dubai Debt Issues Push Stocks Down
Family Gets Early Christmas Gift From Ellen DeGeneres
Photos of D Train Murder Depict Bloody Panic
Mayor: Sex Trafficking Victims, Please Speak Up
GMA: Adam Lambert, No; Chris Brown, Yes
This is the most disturbing story Gothamist has read all day: Kids at some New York City school avoiding going to the bathroom all day not because of that really mean fourth year senior smoking a pack of Camels, but because of dirty and ill-repaired school bathrooms, some of which don't even have toilet paper. A junior tells the Times, "I just try to wait till I get home." Eva Moskowitz, head of the City Council Education Committee, finds that parents are more interested in finding out the state of the bathrooms rather than cover the math curriculum. One parent says about the awful conditions of his child's bathrooms, partly created by the students themselves, "If you treat these kids like animals, they behave like animals."
Bad bathrooms are not limited to NYC public schools: Modesto has similar, if not as dire, problems. Hazards of not taking enough bathroom breaks and bathroom worries for kids.
add to stumble upon
add to reddit
tweet this
post to facebook
this is so true - for the short while that i was a nyc teaching fellow, i never saw toilet paper in the bathrooms at my school (and i.s. in the bronx - actually one of the schools that bloomie stationed cops at recently) - and that included the bathrooms for the teachers! nor was there any soap to wash up afterwards...i learned quickly to bring my own t.p. no wonder those kids are so damn antsy - they all have to pee.
Hmm, the bathrooms here in the office are so nice that people sometimes spend whole afternoons in them.
For the three years I went to Tottenville High School (a NYC public school) in Staten Island I never used the bathroom once. It was worse than the average bathroom at a city park. No stall doors, no paper, graffiti everywhere. Nasty stuff.
I think we should all declare the public school system as it is currently constituted a failure of galactic proportions and figure out where to go from here. I don't think I can take another day of the latest "public school tragedy." It is too heartbreaking, and the pols, whose kids go to private schools, just don't care so long as the teachers unions give them an endorsement. We cannot even begin to talk the real turkey -- a solid liberal arts( not 'vocational' wage-slave training) curriculum if we have to wrestle daily with asbestos, gangs, muggings, backtalk to teachers, teen pregnancy, eyc, etc.
okay, that was perhaps overly political of me, but it just seems that the problem is so vast that we have to start all over again.
I never went to the bathroom all through Junior High. However, that was because we only had 3 minute locker/lav breaks, and it was impossible to go to your locker, get to your next class and go to the bathroom. I still have problems going to the bathroom during the day. I've been scarred for life.
grrr...public school ... evil .... grrr
I held it through four years of public high school. Not only were our restrooms a health hazard, but they also lacked doors on the toilet stalls. Apparently, the powers that be felt that having doors on the stalls would lead to increases in smoking.
If you thought high school was bad before, try sitting down to go to the bathroom with people walking by and seeing you.
Public school is not evil. The system can be, however. We must remember that the NYC public school system is one of the largest in the country. Fixing it entirely is impossible-- it's like trying to fix the LIE...while working on one thing, another piece is bound to break. If anyone or thing is to blame, it is the outright racism of neighborhoods during the 1950's on (in underserved minority areas of the city, where the government just decided to ignore the condition of schools) and the fiscal crisis of the 1970's, where maintenance of schools (and other city facilities) stopped. We have never fully recovered from those things.
We have to remember, however, that there are plenty of wonderful PUBLIC learning communities in NYC. There are small schools that reach NYC children everyday, and not just in wealthy areas. Perhaps they need to serve as models for for those schools that are failing (and there are many). It's not neccessarily the school itself that is to blame for the failures, either. It's the system-- which, no matter what we try to do with it, will never work well because it's too big.
As for using school bathrooms, I spend most of my work days in public schools. I've carefully catalogued lists of "clean bathroom stops" in stores, restaurants, and libraries around the schools that I can seek for relief. Yuck.
In 1993, Steve Snow was elected to Ridge High School Senior Class President on a platform of "I will bring soap to the boys' bathroom."
My ass didn't touch a public toilet seat until I was 17. I lived in a dorm at Monmouth University (then Monmouth College) for NJ Governor's School the summer of 1987. The faculty was mostly comprised of hardcore sandalistas from Harvard Divinity, and they attempted to indoctrinate the students into good little commies. To this day I associate outside-the-home defecation with Daniel Ortega, and my sphincter tightens up when I detect even a whiff of crypto-Marxism.
The latest tragedy is that a little boy who lost a game of basketball was told to stand against a wall while a teachers aide allowed the other boys to kick him in the butt. School officials then, afterwards, tried to convince the boys mother not to sue. And that's just today!
Yes, this incident and the dozens of others that occur daily does not prove conclusively that public school is evil, it shows that we are probably decades away from even just solving the behavioral issues of the staff, much less the students, the construction of buildings, the reading issue, test scores ... not to mention, the most important issue: curriculum.
I was definitely being glib when I said "grr... public school evil," ;) But it is an incredible mess that should probably be scrapped and started from scratch.
I like the low income boarding school idea. Apparently test scores for these kids are way up,closing the minority disparity on test scores, mostly because they are living in an environment where doing homework, studying, retaining lessons, limited tv, and learning are fostered 24/7 (which they mostly do not get in the inner city), and, of course, they go home for vacations and breaks.
as a daily gothamist reader, a self-proclaimed toilet expert (see my weekly Toilet Tuesday column on http://1115.org) and a regular visitor in the New York City Public schools, i feel i must weigh in on this issue.
my fiance held it for four years from 1989 - 1993 in a new york SUBURBAN public school and so many on this site have admitted to the same in these very sam new york public school, so if this problem goes back so far, why all the press now?
i'm all for cleaner bathrooms but this uproar strikes me as something very political, especially with Eva's involvement.
Hell, our offices have lovely bathrooms and I still hold it until I get home. I envy those people who can just plop down and let unabashedly let loose.