POCATELLO — Representatives from School District 25 are considering implementing single stall bathrooms in public schools across Pocatello and Chubbuck to combat growing issues of vaping, bullying and vandalism.
In a modern technological age that has cameras plastered in nearly every hallway and has enabled almost every student to have unbridled access to the internet through cellphones, there is a growing trend of violent and unruly behavior occurring within school bathrooms.
The problem has become so severe that some students have avoided using the restroom altogether while at school, instead waiting hours to use them at gas stations, nearby restaurants or until they get home.
“Working in the schools, I started noticing that multiple problems seem to originate out of the bathroom and I began asking staff members and students if they felt the same, and overwhelmingly staff and students told me they felt that majority of problems schools did originate with bathrooms,” said Pocatello Police Cpl. Jordan Johnson, a current resource officer in School District 25.
Johnson continued, “Problems we've seen in there are fighting, vaping, inappropriate pictures being taken and traded around, bullying and all sorts of different problems.”
Spurred by this surge of discordance that is becoming more and more prevalent, Tonya Wilkes, director of student services and athletics for School District 25 and Courtney Fisher, School District 25 director of communications, spoke with the Idaho State Journal on how the implementation of single stall bathrooms could help eliminate or drastically reduce these issues.
The school district is considering using the Highland High School rebuild as a potential prototype for the new bathrooms, which would utilize tall, single stalls to address students congregating in these spaces.
“We just took this opportunity as Highland is being rebuilt to do things better through and through,” Wilkes said. “One of those (opportunities) is to be more modernized with the bathrooms so that they are safer environments for our students. Our camera systems have been and are continuing to be upgraded. As those become more and more upgraded, kids are finding less and less hiding spots and so those hiding spots are in restrooms.”
Every year the school district follows its capital improvement plan to address the necessary updates to schools including new floors, roofing, painting and countless other upgrades. Each of the 23 schools in School District 25 follow a rotation where the various issues are addressed, ensuring each school can get the attention it needs at the time, especially for more pressing updates.
Using Highland as a template, each time a school would require a bathroom remodel, the school district could implement the single stall redesign.
“When we go through some of these full-scale, when we want to retrofit something, it just follows that natural rotation cycle,” Fisher said.
Potentially adding the single stall bathrooms to all School District 25 schools are still years away. The Highland rebuild won’t be finished until fall 2027 and the designs of the single stall bathrooms at Highland have not yet been finalized. Even once the Highland rebuild is complete and the single stall bathrooms are put in place there, each of the other 22 schools would require their own unique plans based on overall needs and existing layouts.
“We will just keep with the plan and as we see the benefits at Highland, then that just reiterates why we're doing what we're doing,” Wilkes said. “But in the meantime, we've also added extra security measures where we put in a grant for vape detectors. We installed a vape detector this summer in every high school restroom. We're trying to make sure that the safety is still top priority in every school while we're waiting for this to be implemented.”
While much of what is being talked about thus far is tentative, there is a local charter school that has already adopted the single stall bathrooms and the results have been notably positive.
Michael Mendive, the director of Pocatello Community Charter School, oversaw construction of his school's single stall bathrooms in the summer of 2023, which was completed before the beginning of this last school year.
“We did four multi-user bathrooms, or two boy's bathrooms and two girl's bathrooms,” Mendive said. “We were lucky enough where we didn't have to move the (plumbing fixtures). As long as you're building walls and not moving and not tearing up concrete and changing the plumbing, it was pretty reasonable. For us it was about $120,000 for the four bathrooms to redo them into all single-user bathrooms.”
Since implementing single stall bathrooms at the charter school, PCCS has experienced a drastic improvement regarding all the prior issues of bullying or fighting.
“To me, this is a solution to it because the school can monitor through the hallway cameras whatever else is going on and as long as there's one person in the bathroom you can't have a fight,” Mendive said. “You can't have bullying. It solves virtually all of those kinds of issues.”
Mendive continued, “I think 10 years from now, every school is going to have single-user bathrooms. I don’t think they’ll all be single-user bathrooms, but I think that every school is going to have them because it makes life easier for the administrators and for the teachers. We don't want to monitor the bathrooms. We want to be focused on teaching and learning. This makes that much more possible.”
Another interesting byproduct of the single stall bathrooms idea relates to the controversial Idaho “bathroom bill” which “prohibits requiring public works contractors to provide restroom and changing room facilities that they own or control on any basis other than biological sex,” according to the bill's statement of purpose. The single stall bathrooms would help keep schools compliant with state and federal laws instead of choosing to violate one or the other.
“I would focus on the idea that the controversy that exists shouldn't be a kid's problem,” Mendive said. “Every kid deserves four walls and a door so that they can take care of their basic needs, to feel safe and go to school, because that's what we want. We want kids to feel safe, to take care of their needs and to go to school. School is about learning.”
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