As we find ourselves nearing the end of the first semester of the 2021/2022 school year it is urgent we talk about the increasing mistreatment and blatant disrespect of our school bathrooms. Most students will be aware of this problem as it spans the bathrooms of Woodhall, the Student Center, and each one in between.

Common sights in our unapologetically trashed bathrooms may include, toilet paper strewn everywhere, the nauseating presence of food waste, and of course a thin blanket of mystery liquid over the floor. Our wonderful student body truly has a gift for making a mess of school property. Now it has become undeniable that the state of our bathrooms have had negative impacts that ripple through the community. Students unable to concentrate on work due to the predicament of needing to go to the bathroom, but not wanting to use it because one doesn’t want to go next to a knee high pile of TP. There’s also a general feeling of a campus made less appealing due to its general lack of cleanliness. Of course it’s important to acknowledge that someone actually has to clean up those bathrooms, and while we are grateful at Tam to have wonderful staff that put up with our seemingly endless production of headaches, they shouldn’t have to clean up the kinds of messes we manage to produce.

The situation we find ourselves in can be seen all over campus, in the trash we leave at lunch and the writing we put on the walls. Tam students have a lack of respect for our campus, by now it is deeply rooted in our culture. Mill Valley is an affluent and particularly clean city, which is taken for granted, we have become subservient to having a clean environment without ourselves having to work for it, this is no longer a sustainable mindset, we need to progress as a community and work for a clean and respected environment, or we will no longer be in a clean and respected environment.

We should try to take inspiration from the people around us that have actually taken action to reduce the amount of mess in our bathrooms. Recently some staff members came up with a creative solution to deal with graffiti in the Woodhall bathrooms and put up pieces of doodle paper on the wall, and another basic solution that we can all take partake in is to just pick up trash when we see it, and properly dispose of trash when we have it.

The conditions of our bathrooms and campus is not acceptable, and it’s necessary that together as a school we address it.