On March 12th Mr. Deklotz sent out an email to the entire student body regarding vandalism in the bathrooms. In the email he is specifically referring to the vandalism in the Knight Lobby womens bathroom, however, according to Director of Campus Safety Cathe Kent, this situation has been happening all over the Jesuit campus in both the men’s and women’s bathrooms.
According to Kent, a similar situation occurred a few years ago when someone would throw random stuff in the toilet rather than taking five steps to throw it away in the garbage can nearby.
Kent explained how there have been at least one to two instances every week since the beginning of February.
“At the beginning of February, the first instance occurred in the boy’s bathroom in Valley. Students purposely shoved paper towels down the toilet and proceeded to attempt to flush them after which caused the toilets to clog,” Kent said
Since then, there have been more situations that happened in the boy’s Knight Locker room, the PAC, as well as the most recent one which was in the girl’s bathroom in Knight lobby. All of these occurrences of vandalism have been found by other students at Jesuit and then reported to teachers and faculty.
The most concerning incident has been happening in the women’s bathrooms when students are shoving food down the toilets, going to the bathroom on top of it and then trying to flush it all down the toilet. These types of incidents have happened in the Knight Lobby as well as the PAC. Students will go into the bathrooms either before or after school and throw their food such as bananas, chicken burgers as well as even Chinese food in the toilets.
The bigger effect at hand is how the custodial staff are responsible for cleaning it up as well as the bad look that it may present about Jesuit High School and the students.
“The custodial staff have to come in and unplug the toilet or remove the garbage and it can get all over their shoes and clothes. It’s quite disgusting actually and it’s not their job or responsibility to clean that up since students are doing it intentionally,” Kent said
Ms. Kent and the administration have spent many hours of their own time focusing on this issue and trying to get to the bottom of it. They have been watching security camera footage many days since the beginning of February as well as having meetings on this issue.
“If students are intentionally doing that and causing harm and more work for everyone, I really have better things to do than watching videos in front of bathrooms but it is what I have been spending my time doing,” Kent said.
Senior Taylor Stalick was going into the bathroom after her second workshop of the day during social justice week last week. She witnessed the vandalism herself and immediately reported it to Ms. Kaempf, a teacher at Jesuit who was also in the bathroom at the time.
“I was disgusted when I saw the scene and was very surprised that someone would do that especially in the girls bathroom,” Stalick said. “I feel empathy for our custodial staff and cannot believe someone would do that intentionally.”
There have been precautions that have taken place around the community such as closing the women’s Knight Lobby bathroom as well as making students that take classes in Valley leave their backpacks in their classrooms as well as check out when they are going to the bathroom.
Some future precautions that could happen would be to remove paper towels from all bathrooms so that no one will be able to use them or just closing more bathrooms if they are continuously happening in certain ones.
If students are continuing to do this and they happen to cause monetary damage to the school, it can become a criminal offense. If you know anything about this situation or have seen or heard of anyone that has been doing this, report to any school faculty member immediately.
