The restrooms around SHS serve different purposes for different people – taking selfies, doing makeup, talking with friends or using them for their intended purpose of using the bathroom. However, many students find that the school restrooms are not the cleanest they could be, including junior Sam Rust.

Rust is one student that doesn’t like the school restrooms. He believes that a contributing factor to the uncleanliness of the restrooms are students who don’t clean up after themselves.

“Students don’t worry about what other people experience when they go to the restroom,” Rust said.

Rust claims that the worst bathroom in the school is the one in the “ghost hallway” near the science hall. He once walked into that bathroom to see one of the urinals overflowing onto the floor.

“It smells like a combination of bad fish and horse (feces),” Rust said.

Rust thinks that the cleanliness of the student restrooms could be improved if they were cleaned and maintained more regularly.

Junior Megan Irving has strong feelings about the restrooms at school, and most of them are not positive.

“People don’t care,” Irving said. “They just throw things on the floor, and they don’t flush the toilets.”

Irving has seen her fair share of gross sights in the restrooms, and has even taken pictures of what she’s encountered before as proof. She claims the worst bathroom in the school is the one in the foreign language hallway, which she couldn’t even describe the smell of.

Like Rust, Irving also thinks students are the cause of the dirty restrooms.

“I feel like it’s not really the custodians’ fault, it’s a lot of the students that are dirty, very dirty,” Irving said.

Custodian Sherry Henry helps clean the restrooms as part of her job. Henry says that the student restrooms are cleaned in the morning, before lunch and in the evening during the school year. During summer, they get a deep clean.

As far as the overall cleanliness of the restrooms, Henry agrees that students sometimes don’t clean after themselves. She claims the worst bathroom to clean is the one near the study hall room.

“Sometimes the paper towels don’t go in the trash, and some of the toilets don’t get flushed,” Henry said.

Henry says that while it would be possible to clean the bathrooms multiple times a day, they do not have the staff to do so.

“There’s a bunch of other odds and ends we gotta do, but if we had a certain person that could stay on bathrooms all the time, that would be great,” Henry said. “We can only go so far with it.”