In November 2024, the students of Stroudsburg High School (SHS) received an email from the principal, Jeffrey Sodl.
Many students were misbehaving in the time leading up to the email, and he figured it was time to give a written warning, which is why the email listed seven reminders of what students were expected to do daily, a few rules, and informative wake-up calls.
Other than the usual dress code, Smart-Pass, earbuds, and phone reminders, he also mentioned bathrooms.
As of Nov. 15, 2024, students were no longer allowed to go to the bathrooms during ninth period, and only eight bathrooms in the school were left open for girls and boys.
In total, the school has eight girls’ bathrooms, excluding the locker room, basement, nurse’s office, and the main office. The same applies to boys.
When the bathroom lockdown first happened, only four bathrooms remained open for each gender.
Principal Sodl made it clear in the email: “…none of these are to punish anyone, the policies we have are to give you the opportunity to receive the best education in the safest environment.”
With the best intentions in mind when the lockdown happened; however, this posed a new problem for some students.
For example, if a female on the first floor needed to use the bathroom, she either had to go to the cafeteria or the G-wing. If her classroom was in the C-wing, that would be quite a walk, looping hallway around the building.
Likewise, if a male in the E-wing on the second floor needed to use the bathroom, he either had to go all the way to the C-wing bathroom on the second floor or go downstairs to the cafeteria, C-wing, or D-wing bathrooms.
Aymee Molina, ’26, who takes Chemistry with Adam Carter, decides to go to the D-wing bathroom, located in the Foreign Languages Hallway, when she has no other choice.
She thinks, “It was kind of annoying because I would have to walk all the way across the school to get to the open bathrooms, and it took away from my class time.”
It takes around two minutes and 30 seconds for an average-paced one-way trip from the E Hallway to the D-wing bathrooms. If a student takes two and a half minutes to get to the bathroom, about three minutes in the bathroom, plus two and a half minutes to get back to class, the student would need eight minutes.
SmartPass, a digital hall pass system, was implemented in the 2023-2024 school year to increase productivity within the classroom and decrease overcrowding in the bathrooms.
When a student makes a pass, they get an automatic seven-minute countdown from the time they click the “Create Pass” button to the time they return to class and click “End Pass”.
These bathroom closures raised the question: Is seven minutes enough time for students to go to the closest open bathroom and back?
Colton Broadhead, Journalism One, conducted interviews with his fellow sophomores and received contradicting answers as to whether seven minutes is enough time.
Solomon McEaddy, ’27, responded, “No, I don’t think seven minutes is enough time to go to and from the bathroom, especially if you are across the school from a(n) [open] bathroom.”
Andy Oliva, ’27, retorted with the opposite answer, “Yes, I think it is definitely enough time to go to and from the bathroom.”
Since students never received an official reason for why these bathrooms were closed down, frustration has been growing over the last four months.
In an interview with the Mountaineer, Principal Sodl explained why some of the bathrooms were shut down and why students were not allowed to use them during the ninth period.
“From a student’s perspective, I can see why all these rules are frustrating, and we totally agree,” Sodl stated. “We make rules basically for 10 percent of the population who don’t do the right thing, 90 percent always do, but that’s the world we live in unfortunately.”
Sodl recollected the events of November 2024 and said that the bathrooms closed because of vandalism.
He explained, “The reason we don’t have them all open is because they are very difficult to monitor. Believe it or not, there are some students that don’t do the right thing in this school. They find ways to hide in there, vape in there, and just do things that they shouldn’t be doing in school.”
Principal Sodl and the rest of the staff figured the best way to avoid trouble in the bathrooms was to make them unavailable to students. They still tried to make sure to have a certain number of bathrooms open on both floors for girls and boys.
He went on to say that he and the rest of the staff would love to have them all open, but it’s a “managerial nightmare,” and they would eventually have to resort to shutting them down again, which would be unfair to the students who always do the right thing.
Other principals of high schools in the area also have this “bathroom dilemma,” and Sodl says the solution is “just being able to manage them and keep them clean and avoid stuff [arson] that happened last year.”
The ninth-period bathroom ban happened because many students left class and never came back.
The staff are finding a “happy medium as far as location and the number [of bathrooms] that can be open.”
“Discipline problems happen mostly three times in the day: in the morning when they [students] get here, at lunchtime, or at the end of the day,” observed Sodl. “At the end of the day, we found that there were so many bathroom issues in ninth period that we thought, ‘We’ll see what happens if we close them then.’ It has significantly reduced the issues that we have at the end of the day.”
A big point to focus on with this lockdown is that it is all dependent on the student body. The better students behave in the bathroom to regain the staff’s trust, the more bathrooms will open up.
Sodl reminded we always start off the school year by having almost all the bathrooms open, but with time, students get wilder, which is what causes the closings.
One of the last things he had to say was, “There are some students that don’t want to go to the bathroom because of what’s happening in there. We want to avoid that and we want people to feel comfortable going to the bathroom and not having to walk in on something that shouldn’t be happening.”
It is easier for the staff to monitor a few bathrooms closely than to monitor many bathrooms loosely.
Students will be happy to hear that the staff is gaining a little more trust in them every day, and very recently, the G Hallway bathroom, second floor, was reopened.
If the student body keeps this up, most bathrooms at the SHS will be open again in no time!
