Student Bathroom Use

Yes, if you're a parent and you hear that your child isn't allowed to go to the restroom whenever they need or want to at school, you might blow up and think such policies are insane:

• My children told me some of their teachers are limiting bathroom breaks to 3 to 4 times a semester.

• I thought this was an isolated thing, but I asked parents on Facebook, and it's fairly common.

• Experts say limiting bathroom breaks like this can be both physically and psychologically harmful.

  
  

While I don't limit the number of times my students leave for the bathroom--I have no desire to monitor the pee-pee habits of my students--let me share with you a little justification from the secondary school perspective.

Secondary school students will have anywhere from 4 to 8 classes a day.  If each teacher were to limit bathroom passes (again, I don't, but hear me out) to 3 or 4 a semester, your kid could be leaving class anywhere from 12 to 32 times per semester.  What about breaks between classes?  What about lunchtime?  What about immediately before school and after school?  12 to 32 times per semester.  Leaving class.  Missing out on instruction.  And that's if the teachers are limiting bathroom passes.

At my high school there's no guarantee they're headed to the restroom.  No, we have students whom some of us call roamers--they just walk around campus.  They're not your Advanced Placement students, either, if you get my drift.  Once they leave the classroom I have no control over them, and it's not like our administrators have all sorts of free time to walk the campus to ensure that kids who are supposed to be headed to the bathroom are, in fact, headed to the bathroom.  So these kids roam.  They could be gone 20-30 minutes, I have no control over that because I have to stay in the classroom and teach.  

The idea behind bathroom passes is to keep students in class during class time, and to encourage them to use the restrooms when it's not class time.  Given all the mischief secondary students can get into, that's a reasonable goal.

Parents who have nothing better to do than to squeal when they learn their baby's pee-pee rights are being restricted, I ask this--how can we better achieve both our goals?  How can we minimize the missing of class, ensure students are supervised, not have to extend the school day by having longer breaks (there are state laws about "instructional minutes" per school day and year), and satisfy you that your child isn't going to burst his or her bladder?  I'm seriously asking to work together on this.

And I'm not interested in discussing time-of-the-month or medical issues.  Those are issues that should be dealt with separately, as they're nothing students can control.  I want to discuss the 99% of the time when those aren't the issue, how can we better achieve both our goals?

Because that article linked above just runs fingernails down a blackboard for me.  It made it seem like teachers limit leaving classroom just because they can, there was no recognition of the very legitimate reasons for doing so, and such writing does no service to anyone--except those who want to stir up trouble and acrimony.