While using the restroom, I noticed that everything written on the wall was scrubbed off. The ink was still stuck in the cracks with smudges all around, leaving only the leftovers of an unsuccessful scrub down. But my question is, is the writing on the walls really that awful? Why waste the janitors’ time scrubbing away just to have more written back up the next day? Sure, sometimes it gets a little bit much. We can stand to erase people calling others curses, slurs, or just plain old bullying. And sure, we can erase all drawings of private parts. But it’s not all bad. 

“I’ve been writing on the bathroom walls for a while now. Sometimes it’s drawings and other times it’s sentences I think are funny. I also like to write dates so that way in 2030 some kid will see an old date on the wall.” This is was shared by an anonymous student at Bob Jones High School.

History and connection. My research revealed that all kinds of people have written on the walls at some point during their schooling– popular kids, jocks, brains, and loners. No one knows who wrote what unless told and that’s honestly beautiful. History can be shown through the years as students leave their marks left on the inside of a stall. Imagine coming back for your high school reunion and using the bathroom just to see something dumb you wrote your freshman year. 

After pondering over this and once I finished my business, I went to the sink to wash my hands. But as I tried the soap dispenser, nothing came out. The soap bottle inside was crushed from use and completely empty. It is completely understandable that the janitor won’t be able to put out more soap the moment it runs out, but it was seven in the morning. School had just begun, and the soap was already empty. “Refilling soap should be a priority here. It’s unsanitary to have us wash our hands with only water. Especially during a time like this,” said Makayla Brown, a freshman.

So I decided to wash my hands with just water, and I put my hands under the faucet. But nothing came out. Well, actually, something did. Water ran down the back of the sink, like one of those waterfalls you see in fancy restaurants. I checked the other ones and luckily, one of them worked well enough. If well enough means fire is coming out of the faucet, then yeah, it’s pretty great. Swiping my hands under really fast, I washed off nothing and made my way back to class. “Yeah, the water was like that even when I was in high school,” shared my sister Kaley Cooper, a Bob Jones High School graduate.

Maybe we should just not worry about the writing on the wall and focus on keeping the bathrooms functioning properly and stocked.