Here's the scenario: you're sitting in class and, well, you have to go to the bathroom. You ask your teacher, take a pass and walk to the nearest restroom. You push the door and... wait. It's locked. All right, maybe it's just bad luck. You head toward the next bathroom a few hallways down. You pull the handle.... locked again. Now we have a problem.

There are nine boys restrooms in the high school building, including the facilities available in the boys locker room. The restroom in the band and chorus wing of the school has no lock on the door. One of the bathrooms at the front of the school, according to Dr. Heisey, is used exclusively for public events hosted at the high school. Another bathroom, upstairs in the English wing, has been closed because of a plumbing problem and remains in need of repair.

But over the course of the past few months, the remaining five boys restrooms in the school have been locked shut for extended periods of time. Male students have had to embark on round-trip journeys to the far corners of the school just to find an open stall or an available urinal.

"I got so frustrated one day trying to find a bathroom near the end of school that I just gave up and went back to class. I had to wait until I got home," said junior Petros Petridis.

According to Heisey, the boys bathrooms were being repainted due to concerns of excessive graffiti on the walls, and they remained closed during school hours in order to let the fresh paint dry.

These closures made it extremely frustrating and timeconsuming for male students to find an open bathroom, not to mention impossible for most of them to make a restroom pit stop in between classes. And students who have to rush to the front of the school to catch their 2:30 bus ride home just don't have the time to search far and wide for an unlocked bathroom. That can make for one long, unpleasant trip home.

The decision to close the majority of boys restrooms in order to rid them of typical, hastily scrawled graffiti on the stall walls has caused far too many problems for male students in the building. For the future, if the school administration finds it necessary to repaint the bathrooms every so often, they need to take the basic needs of students into account. Surely restrooms could be painted at different times in order to minimize the inconveniences that students have to deal with.

Because, let's face it: most kids don't walk into the bathroom to scan the walls for the newest graffiti. They gotta do what they gotta do.