South Western’s elected school board is making some strange decisions.
For the last two years, they’ve fixated on which bathrooms LGBTQ+ kids use. In 2023, officials in this Hanover-area district played musical chairs with school bathrooms in a misguided attempt to appease the loudest bigots among them — ending up with five different types of bathrooms.
After a low-turnout school board election in which several far-right members joined their ranks, they hired a Christian law firm, decided to begin banning books and reopened the bathroom issue. Board President Matthew Gelazela, who was elevated to his post after previously serving as the board’s most vocal bomb-thrower, pointed to Red Lion’s discriminatory policies as something to aspire to.
Now, upon the advice of that law firm — the Harrisburg-based Independence Law Center — the board approved spending $8,700 to cut windows so passersby can look into the so-called “gender-identity” student bathrooms.
Whoever approved this is clearly very weird.
Yeah, is this not like blatantly pedophilic? Very weird
pedophilic
And yet, I don’t see any evidence of drag queen or gay involvement.
I’m betting there is some sort of legal prohibition against creating a mixed-gender restroom, and the way they are getting around it is by declaring only the toilet stalls to be restrooms. With the window into the area of the sinks, that area is a public space, and can’t legally be considered part of the restroom.
So long as the toilets are in actual rooms with floor to ceiling walls and actual doors (not the bullshit stalls we typically use in the US), and those rooms don’t have windows, this isn’t as terrible an idea as it initially seems.
They have already created gender neutral restrooms, according to the article these windows are not in those.
There’s 2 stalls visible in the picture. The walls are not floor to ceiling, the doors have larger gaps above and though it isn’t visible, I expect also a gap below. It’s not clear if there are vertical visibility slits on the sides of the doors. But they’re clearly just stalls really.
But it doesn’t really matter how the stalls are, the way that we know that this is targeted spite and bullying, is that windows are being cut only in a specific subset of the restrooms. They’re trying to shame and intimidate the kids that are in those restrooms.
Possible.
It’s also possible that the stalls do provide an adequate degree of privacy, coming very close to the floor, and sufficiently high enough to prevent people from seeing inside. They certainly don’t look like the stalls my school used.
Frankly, if their intention is to shame and intimidated, I’m rather surprised they are going to this much effort, when they could just not do anything at all.
Do we know that the other, gender-neutral restrooms are similarly communal? Is it possible that they are single-user facilities with sinks, and need only appropriate signage to make them inclusive?
After a low-turnout school board election in which several far-right members joined their ranks, they hired a Christian law firm, decided to begin banning books and reopened the bathroom issue.
Fucking VOTE you dumb sons of bitches!
Now, upon the advice of that law firm — the Harrisburg-based Independence Law Center — the board approved spending $8,700 to cut windows so passersby can look into the so-called “gender-identity” student bathrooms.
Anyone want to take a bet that someone at the law firm or on the school board, really loves to sexual assault children?
This seems to be a pretty blatant violation of IBC chapter 21 1210.3
That doesn’t seem to be a code? Are you talking about the cope lintel and I guess 2104.1.1?
*oh that’s some 2021 version change. PA is on 2018 and chapter 21 is masonry which got me to the other violation.
You can violate 2021 IBC all you want in PA because it isn’t adopted code. 2018 only cares about privacy for urinal partitions and the enclosed stalls which weren’t touched.
Dang I didn’t realize root beer has so many rules.
Sassafras, one of the main traditional ingredients in the manufacture of root beer, is carcinogenic and has been banned in the US since 1960. There are a surprising number of rules surrounding root beer.
Ah, this takes me back to my own high school days back in the 90s where none of the boys’ toilet stalls had doors on them. I assume as some sort of anti-masturbation tactic. I’ve got nervous bathroom issues already so I basically held it in until I got home most of the time.
We had a bunch of stalls in the 90s without doors, but the janitors told us it was just because asshole kids would break the doors for fun and the school would run out of money to repair them.
Even just partially damaging a door can make it a dangerous enough that the school would rather take it down than risk a lawsuit.
Made more sense to me than some sort of anti masturbation strategy. High school kids are fucking dumb as shit and I can definitely imagine them breaking stall doors for fun
Yup, at my highschool by week 5 they’d be swapping all the gender signs on the bathrooms because the girls were wrecking the mirrors and the boys would bust the doors, and they only had the budget to fix each once so they’d rotate who used which bathrooms to even out the type of damage so even though boys were constantly smashing the doors the first door wouldn’t come off the hinge until the end of first term (versus within the first week, which was the damage rate before faculty started the sign swap system).
There was one year where in Term 4 we had a row of porta-pottys because some one’s dad owned a shitter company and that was cheaper than fixing the real bathrooms.
I don’t know why those degenerates were breaking the bathrooms knowing they’d be stuck pissing with the normal door… Why they couldn’t just set fire to the grass behind the woodshop like normal delinquents. Grass grows back for free.
I work at a community education centre now, and the soap dispensers appear to be what everyone likes destroying these days.
We can’t afford to replace them so we currently have bottles of hand soap tied to the taps with string that I replace every other day.
Also I’ve had to put signs up reminding teenagers that poo particles from flushing will land on every surface in a bathroom, so stop kissing the mirrors.
Kids slamming bathroom stall doors and kicking them with their feet seems to be pretty common from my vague memories.
Curtain rods and opaque shower curtains it is then. The more they get stolen the more kid like they get replaced with until they have to shit looking at Dora the Explorer.
It only just occurred to me that bathroom stalls in the schools almost never have any marketing on them like they do at shopping centres, ours certainly don’t.
Which isn’t weird, (obviously don’t want corporate marketing into schools) but at home you hang stuff in your bathroom when you have kids- map of the world, vexology poster, dinosaur poster, etc, and I’m always trying to find a way to force my students to actually look at the term calendar in advance instead of being suprised that there’s a scheduled assessment today.
I’m replacing the soap in the bathrooms every day, how has it never occurred to me to slap a poster on the back of the door so the students have something to look at, I’ve got so many posters with no wall space too!
That’s a pretty awesome idea. Just know that it’s going to get defaced so you’ll likely have to replace it every now and then.
I went through 4 years of high school without ever taking a shit at school for this very reason.
It wasn’t because the bathrooms were disgusting?
During that TikTok toilet stealing thing that happened, the schools here removed all the stall doors.
I can’t believe this isn’t illegal. What the thru idk fuck.
You’ve always got to show up for those school board elections now. Every. Single. Time.
Or live in Houston and the governor can just strip your School Board of power, then install an unelected bureaucrat to loot the school treasury.
Tread on me, daddy.
Yeah we’re the freest state in the union as long as your chosen freedom conforms with the Republican agenda.
Mmmmm Texasy
Texussy
From a local station.
"Our students should not consider the space outside of our stalls as private within the multiuser restrooms. Our current policy states ‘In any facility in a District school that is for use based on Gender Identity, in which a person may be in a state of undress in the presence of others, school personnel shall provide private changing areas for use.’ Areas between our stalls and sinks in multiuser restrooms are not private changing areas under that policy.
Just fucking WOW. I guess we should check their assholes next.
Ok, I’ll explain that a little better: the place where you take a shit is a private space. The place where you wash your hands is a public space.
In a normal restroom, it is permissible to be partially undressed outside of the stalls, but within the hand washing area of the restroom, as that can be considered a changing area, like a locker room.
With the addition of the window, there is no longer a place that can be considered a “changing area” outside the stalls. If they built proper walls and used proper doors for the “stalls”, they just made some private restrooms next to some public sinks.
The discourse around this is very confusing, especially as a non American who has never been in an American school bathroom.
What you’re describing sounds like a normal public toilet set up in my country
There’s a hallway or doorway into an open space with mirrors sinks and hand dryers, sometimes that hallway has a door to it, but often it’s just an open door frame. Sometimes they’ll put a 90 degree turn in the hall to obscure looking straight in, but not always.
Behind the sinks are private stalls. At more expensive locations they’ll have semiambulant stalls, some will even have their own sink inside the stall so that the full access toilet and wash room can be available to those who can’t ambulate.
(full access toilets and wash rooms are entirely seperate from the sink and stalls)
The sink area is often still segregated by gender at older establishments, but anyone walking past could glimpse in and see /shock fully dressed people washing their hands!
These are the people who continually call everyone on the left “groomers” and taking an unhealthy interest in kids? The same people cutting peepholes into school bathrooms?
Every accusation is an admission. Never forget it.
Anyone who shows up to a school board meeting to complain about bathrooms should automatically have the police sent to look at their hard drive. If you’re that concerned about the bathroom habits of young children, the cops really need to look at your internet history and the contents of your hard drive.
Yep, the people whose entire personality is combating the “woke liberal left”.
You know, the people they portray is foaming at the mouth woke crusaders. When in actuality, 95% of left voters consist of people who don’t give a shit about all this besides listening to the oppressed minorities problems and proposed solutions, and showing the smallest amount of empathy.
“Oh damn, I didn’t realize you dealt with that shit. Yeah, ok, gender neutral bathrooms are cool. Whatever you need, doesn’t bother me.”
Right: “screeeeeeeee!!!”
You only need two types of bathrooms. One for standing while peeing and the other for sitting. That’s the only way bathrooms need to be divided.
I noticed neither of your stated options has windows.
Well no…that would be weird.
Only if you’re not a fundie wack job
For a lot of women the bathroom is the only way to escape unwanted male attention.
But that’s not what bathrooms are for. I lament the state of our society that has so many women scared of men and I do what (little) I can to be a good ally.
But bathrooms are for expelling biological waste from one of three holes in the human body. And for washing afterwards. For that purpose, single occupancy toilet stalls (with floor to ceiling walls) and communal sinks is sufficient.
Now it can be like an attraction at a zoo
“Guys, guys… If we just hurt these kids enough, it will force them back into the closet and we’ll get to pretend LGBTQ+ kids don’t exist!” - These assholes, probably
That’s the plan. Ostracize to literal death and pretend it’s an unfortunate side-effect that following a god (more specifically, their god) will fix.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, it’s not the substance of the issue that matters at all, it’s the taboo. Accepting these kids diminishes their kink, they’re not being naughty if it’s socially acceptable and wheres the fun in that.
Gorilla glue and posters. Repeat Ad nauseum.
These are really fucking weird and dangerous people.
the windows help “[add] privacy in the toilet facility”
???
I understand it now!
The window looks over the sink area where you would wash your hands after ensuring you are dressed and decent upon leaving the private stall.
The idea is by having the window in the wash area, students will be hyperconscious that this is not a private space, and they will be mindful to move into the truly private stall before starting their private business.
I think it’s purely to avoid the following example;
The number of times I’ve stepped into a public restroom because I needed to fix something privately - my stockings are rolling down, a bandaid on my upper thigh needs replacing, my bra strap is coming loose. These are things that are private but not as private as using the toilet, so often I’ll just fix these things up while I’m at the sink area, I don’t need a stall.
But if someone walks in while I’m fixing my stockings, well they didn’t consent to seeing so much of my upper thigh when they turned the corner, and while I personally don’t care that they saw me, I can see how a teenage girl might be deeply upset if this happened because she absent mindedly forgot that the sink area is not truly private.
Spooky I think it’s to constahtkt remind the students that onky the stalls are truly private.
It’s a misguided, and potentially harmful way to do this though…
Right, Windows never added privacy.
War is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength, Republican bullshit is still Republican bullshit.
I don’t think these school board members have enough privacy in their homes.
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Sorry isn’t “gender identity” the most common public restroom type in America, and also the opposite of the one they’re concerned about? They aren’t putting windows in the boys’ room or the girls’ room, which are segregated by gender. These are the gender neutral restrooms that they want to peek into (or really, discourage anyone from using). Up is down with these people.
Edit: Wait, I just looked at the picture again. The caption says gender neutral, but the actual signage on the restroom says “Boys” and then below that “Gender Inclusive” and I’m not sure how those two things go together.
Time to retrofit some staff bathrooms and save them 18k doing it themselves
