One question that many Poly students have, even though it is simple, is: Why aren’t there more bathrooms? Our school is quite large, and throughout all three floors of the main building there are only two for boys, and two for girls. 

The first floor girls’ bathroom in the main building between classes is so crowded that oftentimes there is not enough space to wait your turn, with people slamming the door into those waiting in line when they open it. Junior Hannah Gross stated, “there is not enough room for the rush of students in between classes, there are not enough stalls either.” Clearly, this situation is less than ideal. It is difficult to use one of the three stalls on the first and second floors between classes. 

There is not enough space to wait in the bathroom. A reasonable solution would be to have bathrooms with more stalls on both the first and second floors of the main building because that is where they have demand. Every student who needs to go to the bathroom near their class should be able to. Gross added, “often if I want to make it to class on time, I cannot go to the bathroom because the wait is too long for the five-minute break we have.” More bathrooms near the main building would solve this problem. It simply does not make sense that there is an abundance of stalls in the Novogratz where people rarely are, yet in the most high-traffic areas there are tiny bathrooms with only three stalls. 

It is possible that structurally, we cannot fit more bathrooms in the main building. Head of Upper School Sarah Bates wrote in an email to the Polygon that “the bathrooms (and all of the plumbing associated) have not changed in my 11 years at Poly, with the exception of new bathrooms installed in newer buildings. The main building is over 150 years old, so moving spaces like bathrooms that require significant plumbing and building codes is difficult, I imagine.”

 In the Novogratz Center, a newer building, we have an abundance of bathrooms — the girls’ bathroom has about fifteen stalls, which there is not enough demand for because there are never enough people there to need that many stalls. 

Still, our school, with all of its facilities, needs one of the most basic ones. Before we make any new additions to our school, it is necessary that we think about adding bathrooms. New bathrooms with more stalls would be a great addition to our school, given Poly’s many resources.