The potty. The bathroom. The John. Whatever you call it, everyone knows what it is, and everyone has to use it. At our own houses, we use them however we please, but in public places people are often a bit more wary in their approach to relieve themselves.

Public bathrooms are notorious for less than clean conditions and huge messes. Paper towels are often strewn around the place, and water and other liquids cover the floor. Unfortunately, our own school is no better.

At West, we are a community, a family, a group of people that tries to help each other out no matter the circumstances. We fail to come together in one vital area: the restrooms. This is supposed to be a place where we can enjoy our time while we are there, but West offers a radically different experience. Our bathrooms here are littered with profanity and drawings of certain parts of the male anatomy. There is soap all over the floor and paper towels are all over the place.

Now, we at “The Epic” don’t blame the janitorial staff at all, in fact we applaud them for their hard work and willingness to deal with students and their messes. The blame should fall more on the student body itself that slowly poisons the bathrooms every day by trashing them. We all have to use it at one point in the school year, so why make our time there a bad experience?

Students, please don’t ruin it for all of us. What does one get out of trashing a bathroom? A feeling of sticking it to the man? The fun of destroying something? No matter the reason, it doesn’t make sense to everyone else. We all have to use the bathroom, and by trashing them you ruin it for everyone, student and staff, that have to use the bathrooms.

We don’t expect a state of the art bathroom. Our bathrooms pale in comparison to the restrooms at places like the Nelson Atkins Museum or Union Station, but they don’t need to be garbage heaps. The amount of litter and graffiti on the walls is disgusting. The best bathrooms at West are arguably the ones in the Spanish hallway. Even then, they still get disrespected by unruly students who think it is okay to ruin the bathrooms by littering, drawing graffiti and leaving other messes in there.

So, how can we fix the bathroom situation? Well the obvious solution is to install cameras in every bathroom, so the SROs can monitor all bathroom activity and stop it at the source. Just kidding, but a real solution could be all of the students pitch in and help clean up the bathrooms. If there are paper towels all over the floor pick up one or two. If every student works to wipe up soap from the floor, clean off bathroom stall graffiti and pick up all of the litter on the floor maybe, just maybe, our bathrooms here could provide a pleasant experience.