Removal of restroom doors alarms some students at Oak Park and River Forest High School in Chicago suburbs
Oak Park and River Forest High School has taken the doors off some student restrooms — and school leaders say there is a reason behind it.
By Marissa Sulek
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CHICAGO (WBBM) — Oak Park and River Forest High School has taken the doors off some student restrooms — and school leaders say there is a reason behind it.
But some students were not pleased at all when they found the exterior doors gone from most of the men’s and women’s restrooms on the very first day back to class this year.
OPRF junior Laila Rosenthal immediately disagreed with the idea.
“I want to feel safe, and then I feel like a bunch other of my peers — like, I did this for them too,” she said.
Rosenthal started a Change.org petition to get the doors back, which had nearly 400 hundreds of signatures as of Tuesday night.
When CBS News Chicago reached out to school administrators, they issued a statement saying they removed the doors after receiving multiple complaints last year.
“The decision to remove the exterior doors of most bathrooms at the school was based on an evidence-based practice in architecture called crime prevention through environmental design or CPTED,” OPRF said in the statement. “One of the most frequent complaints that we received last year from parents, faculty, staff, and students was about inappropriate activities taking place in the bathrooms, such as vaping, skipping class, fighting, and so forth.”
“I think that they could have done things like vape detectors or smoke detectors, because those do exist,” said OPRF junior Gia Fredrisdorf.
Fredrisdorf said there are other measures the school could have taken. Instead, she said, OPRF made a decision that poses safety hazards.
“If you’re in the bathroom, you have to hide in the bathroom from like a school shooter or something,” Fredrisdorf said. “If there’s no doors in the bathroom, that’s another risk.”
School officials emphasized that passersby cannot see into the restrooms, and bad behavior in the restrooms has been reduced. The OPRF statement continued:
“The exterior doors were removed only from bathrooms where doing so did not provide a direct line of sight into the area where stalls or urinals are located. None of the stall doors were removed. The bathroom entrances now function similarly to those you see at airports, many schools, and other public places where the bathrooms do not have entrance doors.
“This is only our third week of school, but our Campus Safety staff report fewer crowds of students are congregating in the bathrooms now.”
“Me personally, I’m pretty indifferent to it,” said student Donovan Lee.
Lee said he sees why the administrators made the decision.
“It definitely makes a huge difference,” he said. “I haven’t seen too many people come in to like vape or do anything like that.”
Student Venus Sokolowski agrees.
“I’m really happy, because people used to vape there, and like less people are doing it now,” she said.
Meanwhile, Rosenthal said she is aiming to garner more signatures and bring her petition to school officials.
“Once I get to 500, I’m going to have a conversation with the principal or the board or something,” she said.
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