South Western’s elected school board is making some strange decisions.
For the last two years, they’ve fixated on which bathrooms LGBTQ+ kids use. In 2023, officials in this Hanover-area district played musical chairs with school bathrooms in a misguided attempt to appease the loudest bigots among them — ending up with five different types of bathrooms.
After a low-turnout school board election in which several far-right members joined their ranks, they hired a Christian law firm, decided to begin banning books and reopened the bathroom issue. Board President Matthew Gelazela, who was elevated to his post after previously serving as the board’s most vocal bomb-thrower, pointed to Red Lion’s discriminatory policies as something to aspire to.
Now, upon the advice of that law firm — the Harrisburg-based Independence Law Center — the board approved spending $8,700 to cut windows so passersby can look into the so-called “gender-identity” student bathrooms.
Perverts and child abusers, the lot.
I can’t believe this isn’t illegal. What the thru idk fuck.
After a low-turnout school board election in which several far-right members joined their ranks, they hired a Christian law firm, decided to begin banning books and reopened the bathroom issue.
Fucking VOTE you dumb sons of bitches!
They are out of their minds
“Guys, guys… If we just hurt these kids enough, it will force them back into the closet and we’ll get to pretend LGBTQ+ kids don’t exist!” - These assholes, probably
That’s the plan. Ostracize to literal death and pretend it’s an unfortunate side-effect that following a god (more specifically, their god) will fix.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, it’s not the substance of the issue that matters at all, it’s the taboo. Accepting these kids diminishes their kink, they’re not being naughty if it’s socially acceptable and wheres the fun in that.
Does $9,000 seem a bit low for the cost of adding windows to all the relevant restrooms in a school district?
Eh. Sawzall through cinder-block, pre-built window and frame, some caulk. Sure.
some caulk.
Better not be any of that in the GIRL’S bathroom!!
not completely on topic but here you go:
It looks like the district has 6 schools, not sure how many of these bathrooms are in each school, but I’m going to assume they’re probably only adding one of each gender identity bathroom per school, or 2 each, 3 if we count the unisex bathrooms.
I have no real frame of reference for what kind of windows they’re installing, so I’m not sure how much they cost, and of course windows can get as expensive as you care to spend. But after perusing home Depots website, let’s just say $500 a pop for materials.
Depending on how competent their district maintenance personnel are, they may be able to install it themselves and not need to bring in contractors, pay for overtime, etc so esentially free installation.
6 schools × 3 bathrooms × $500 per window does come out too $9000 on the dot.
Don’t know how accurate my estimates and assumptions are, but it’s potentially within the realm of possibility
This seems to be a pretty blatant violation of IBC chapter 21 1210.3
Dang I didn’t realize root beer has so many rules.
Sassafras, one of the main traditional ingredients in the manufacture of root beer, is carcinogenic and has been banned in the US since 1960. There are a surprising number of rules surrounding root beer.
That doesn’t seem to be a code? Are you talking about the cope lintel and I guess 2104.1.1?
*oh that’s some 2021 version change. PA is on 2018 and chapter 21 is masonry which got me to the other violation.
You can violate 2021 IBC all you want in PA because it isn’t adopted code. 2018 only cares about privacy for urinal partitions and the enclosed stalls which weren’t touched.
In case anyone else was wondering how they came up with 5 types of bathroom:
bathrooms for males assigned as male at birth, females assigned as female at birth, males based on gender identity, females based on gender identity, and private, single-use bathrooms for all students to use.
…those don’t even remotely work to serve all genders.
I still wouldn’t technically be able to pee anywhere if I was a student at that school (other than the single stall room…why not just have a bunch like that?)
the fact they have the space for all of that means they have the space to eliminate communal bathrooms altogether
It sounded like that’s their current “problem.”. Since it’s the adults with agendas that are doing the only complaining, the kids are just using whatever bathroom is most convenient, so CIS kids are using the Identify as X bathroom because they don’t care, they just need to use a damn bathroom. I took it as that’s why they want the windows in the non CIS bathrooms.
I feel stupider for having to try to explain this like it makes any sense. Just have single, unisex bathrooms already like everyone has at home!
the windows help “[add] privacy in the toilet facility”
???
I understand it now!
The window looks over the sink area where you would wash your hands after ensuring you are dressed and decent upon leaving the private stall.
The idea is by having the window in the wash area, students will be hyperconscious that this is not a private space, and they will be mindful to move into the truly private stall before starting their private business.
I think it’s purely to avoid the following example;
The number of times I’ve stepped into a public restroom because I needed to fix something privately - my stockings are rolling down, a bandaid on my upper thigh needs replacing, my bra strap is coming loose. These are things that are private but not as private as using the toilet, so often I’ll just fix these things up while I’m at the sink area, I don’t need a stall.
But if someone walks in while I’m fixing my stockings, well they didn’t consent to seeing so much of my upper thigh when they turned the corner, and while I personally don’t care that they saw me, I can see how a teenage girl might be deeply upset if this happened because she absent mindedly forgot that the sink area is not truly private.
Spooky I think it’s to constahtkt remind the students that onky the stalls are truly private.
It’s a misguided, and potentially harmful way to do this though…
I don’t think these school board members have enough privacy in their homes.
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Right, Windows never added privacy.
War is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength, Republican bullshit is still Republican bullshit.
Ah, this takes me back to my own high school days back in the 90s where none of the boys’ toilet stalls had doors on them. I assume as some sort of anti-masturbation tactic. I’ve got nervous bathroom issues already so I basically held it in until I got home most of the time.
I went through 4 years of high school without ever taking a shit at school for this very reason.
It wasn’t because the bathrooms were disgusting?
We had a bunch of stalls in the 90s without doors, but the janitors told us it was just because asshole kids would break the doors for fun and the school would run out of money to repair them.
Even just partially damaging a door can make it a dangerous enough that the school would rather take it down than risk a lawsuit.
Made more sense to me than some sort of anti masturbation strategy. High school kids are fucking dumb as shit and I can definitely imagine them breaking stall doors for fun
Kids slamming bathroom stall doors and kicking them with their feet seems to be pretty common from my vague memories.
Yup, at my highschool by week 5 they’d be swapping all the gender signs on the bathrooms because the girls were wrecking the mirrors and the boys would bust the doors, and they only had the budget to fix each once so they’d rotate who used which bathrooms to even out the type of damage so even though boys were constantly smashing the doors the first door wouldn’t come off the hinge until the end of first term (versus within the first week, which was the damage rate before faculty started the sign swap system).
There was one year where in Term 4 we had a row of porta-pottys because some one’s dad owned a shitter company and that was cheaper than fixing the real bathrooms.
I don’t know why those degenerates were breaking the bathrooms knowing they’d be stuck pissing with the normal door… Why they couldn’t just set fire to the grass behind the woodshop like normal delinquents. Grass grows back for free.
I work at a community education centre now, and the soap dispensers appear to be what everyone likes destroying these days.
We can’t afford to replace them so we currently have bottles of hand soap tied to the taps with string that I replace every other day.
Also I’ve had to put signs up reminding teenagers that poo particles from flushing will land on every surface in a bathroom, so stop kissing the mirrors.
Curtain rods and opaque shower curtains it is then. The more they get stolen the more kid like they get replaced with until they have to shit looking at Dora the Explorer.
It only just occurred to me that bathroom stalls in the schools almost never have any marketing on them like they do at shopping centres, ours certainly don’t.
Which isn’t weird, (obviously don’t want corporate marketing into schools) but at home you hang stuff in your bathroom when you have kids- map of the world, vexology poster, dinosaur poster, etc, and I’m always trying to find a way to force my students to actually look at the term calendar in advance instead of being suprised that there’s a scheduled assessment today.
I’m replacing the soap in the bathrooms every day, how has it never occurred to me to slap a poster on the back of the door so the students have something to look at, I’ve got so many posters with no wall space too!
That’s a pretty awesome idea. Just know that it’s going to get defaced so you’ll likely have to replace it every now and then.
These posters are destined for the recycling bin (they’re the old ones from the main classroom) so if anything it might reduce damage to other things if people are defacing the poster instead.
though in saying that, we don’t have a tagging issue at our centre - I’ve rarely had to remove graffiti from toilets, it’s only the soap dispensers that keep getting messed with here, but ripping the posters is also fine, if it makes someone less tempted to rip the soap off the wall.
Well that’s cool, I like seeing educators this involved.
During that TikTok toilet stealing thing that happened, the schools here removed all the stall doors.
I’d love to invite a board member to urinate into a jar in the middle of a meeting since that should be perfectly acceptable.
I’m sure they’ll all run to the jar like some halfwit version of political saw…
You only need two types of bathrooms. One for standing while peeing and the other for sitting. That’s the only way bathrooms need to be divided.
For a lot of women the bathroom is the only way to escape unwanted male attention.
But that’s not what bathrooms are for. I lament the state of our society that has so many women scared of men and I do what (little) I can to be a good ally.
But bathrooms are for expelling biological waste from one of three holes in the human body. And for washing afterwards. For that purpose, single occupancy toilet stalls (with floor to ceiling walls) and communal sinks is sufficient.
Now it can be like an attraction at a zoo
I noticed neither of your stated options has windows.
Well no…that would be weird.
Only if you’re not a fundie wack job
Yeah… Protect me from those creeps watching my kid in the bathroom… wait…
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Do all these weirdos have gendered bathrooms in their homes? Just install single person non gendered bathrooms or floor to ceiling stalls and non connected sinks and be done with it.
I point out that communal bathrooms are the problem every time this type of nonsense shows up
I think the problem is the bigotry, personally.
