False fire alarms light up discord over bathroom access

After frequent false alarms, what many believe have been triggered by students vaping in the Innovation Building Bathrooms, Samohi admin closed all bathrooms in the building from Nov. 26- Nov. 28, reigniting student and faculty frustration with bathroom access and conditions and fanning the embers of concern about school and community safety.  False alarms in the Innovation Building have been activated 12 times since Oct. 18. Every time a fire alarms goes off on campus, the Fire Department deploys to the school to assess the threat, and that is unfairly and unnecessarily putting the rest of the Santa Monica Community at risk, according to Samo Principal Dr. Antonio Shelton.To curb the behavior he believes has contributed to the excessive false alarms, Dr. Shelton ordered the bathrooms in the Innovation Building locked.“I closed them because [students] are creating a safety hazard for the rest of our community…[students] created panic and havoc, and impacted other portions of our community, which is a problem,” Dr. Shelton said.Teachers and students were as rankled by the bathroom closures as they were by the frequent evacuations that many believe inure students to the urgency of fire alarms.  Teachers, especially, were concerned by the loss of instructional time for students, while student concerns tended to be about fairness and logistics .“If a student asks to go to the bathroom, my immediate response will be ‘no’, because I know it will take them 15 minutes to get back to class,” McKellar said.Some students, displeased by the bathroom closures, responded to signs announcing that the bathrooms would be closed until further notice, with their own signs highlighted a portion of The California Department of Education’s K-12 Toilet Requirement Summary. According to California Plumbing Code, schools are required by law to have one toilet available for every 40 secondary school students. Students who have most of  their classes in the Innovation Building were the most outspoken about the situation. “It was a hassle to walk all the way to the History Building just to use the restroom, considering I have three classes in Innovation. I think it was just very impractical, on top of being apparently illegal,” Nikola Kuraica (’21) said.Disquiet over bathroom access and conditions has been a recurring problem at Samo. Though night custodians leave all bathrooms clean and stocked with paper goods, by the end of the day, custodians will find paper towels strewn on the floors and toilet paper rolls clogging the toilets.  “There are times I am forced to close the bathrooms because of suspicious behavior or events that occur in them.  Your help is needed to ensure that the restrooms are safe, clean and free of smoke caused by vaping or e-cigs. Please inform us of behaviors that are not acceptable in a school environment,” Dr. Shelton said.Dr. Shelton admits that closing the bathrooms is only a temporary fix to the bathroom problem, and encourages students to take more ownership of the campus.“It is important that we are considerate of others and the facilities that we all share.  This school belongs to the students and it is the students’ responsibility to take care of it.  We cannot speak one thing and do another. We fix problems with a collective effort,” Shelton said