Local School Bathrooms Are Just Terrible

The state of public school bathrooms in our area reported by DNAinfo today is just appalling. Citing inspection records at MS 51, PS 321, PS 39, PS 10, and PS/MS 282, they found that there are serious problems at those schools’ bathrooms, which students agree with:

Third-grader Oscar Rosenstein, 8, makes sure he uses the bathroom before heading off to the school every morning, because he refuses to use the “horrible” toilet in the mini school building behind P.S. 321’s main facility, according to his dad, Neal Rosenstein.

“I wouldn’t go to the school bathroom if I were you…I haven’t gone to the bathroom today,” Oscar recently wrote in a homework assignment on the proper use of contractions, Rosenstein said.

With funding from the Department of Education earmarked for larger, apparently more pressing projects, schools have been reaching out to local politicians for help, and people like City Councilmember Brad Lander has been working on participatory budgeting projects to help fund repairs.

“Time for action,” Lander said this morning on Twitter.

But if just one school’s bathrooms cost $1 million to repair, participatory budgeting (where a Councilmember lets the community pick projects that would use $1M in discretionary funds) won’t cut it. So how long will kids have to hold it before these bathrooms get fixed?