Granite School District building mixed gender bathrooms at two high schools

SOUTH SALT LAKE — The Granite School District shared designs for new bathrooms aimed at reducing bullying and vandalism, but some argue it’s taking away student’s privacy.

The new bathroom design coming to Cyprus and Skyline High Schools includes individual toilet rooms with floor to ceiling doors. The district said they’ll be labeled for boys or girls.

“You have complete privacy when you’re in there, and then the sinks are the shared space where you will have boys and girls using that shared sink,” district spokesperson Andrea Stringham said.

The bathrooms are open concept with transparent glass bordering the bathrooms from the hallway outside.

“We can have cameras that are facing the hallway so you can see who’s entering, who’s exiting,” Stringham said. “It’s easier to see if there’s anything going on.”

She said school administrators will work with students who don’t identify as male or female.

“If there is a student who doesn’t feel like they conform to a gender norm, we have them work with the administration to make appropriate accommodations for them,” Stringham said. “We haven’t heard of many issues with that since the start of the school year, so we don’t anticipate that being an issue with these bathrooms.”

Stringham says they’re optimistic this design will prevent extensive vandalism and bullying from taking place inside school bathrooms.

“This is just a second option for students who don’t feel safe using the traditional bathrooms,” Stringham said.

Both campuses will have three of the new models of bathrooms, along with the traditional model.

Stringham said they’re trying to put an end to nonstop vandalism.

“We get weekly reports of vandalism happening in the bathrooms, we get weekly reports of vaping happening in bathrooms,” she said. “There’s been truthfully quite a few evacuations this year because vaping in the bathroom has set off the smoke detector, so it’s interrupting class time.”

She said a lot of bullying takes place in the bathrooms, too.

“Over the weekend, we had a parent email in and say that their student was using the restroom, someone came in and recorded their shoes, put it on social media just to embarrass the student. And we hear a lot of stories like that,” Stringham said.

Granite School Board member Kim Chandler said she recognizes there’s an issue with bullying and vandalism in school bathrooms, but she doesn’t agree this bathroom design is the solution.

“How does combining male and female restroom spaces into one address behavior issues?” she said.

She has issues with the mixed gender aspect of this newer design.

“Girls and boys are different, everybody knows they’re different,” Chandler said. “Girls have different privacy needs, they have different concerns, different cleanliness habits, different things that embarrass them, different safety issues. Putting them together does not serve our young girls and our women. It puts them in a place where they are no longer safe.”

Chandler said she’s in support of dividing the boys and girls spaces with a wall.

She said other people have voiced concerns about what could happen in the toilet rooms.

“A lot of parents have been concerned about their daughters having to use these restrooms,” Chandler said.

Stringham said the district has heard more from parents who are supportive of the plans.

“We understand a lot of people are not in support of this, but truthfully, we aren’t seeing those people who are within our school district,” she said. “Their students aren’t coming to our classes, their students aren’t enrolled in our schools.”

Chandler said she felt like a lot of people weren’t aware of the changes.

“I feel like it’s an important topic that people do have opinions on and should be allowed to discuss,” she said.

She said there are elements of the design she’d like to see play out.

“I don’t particularly have an issue with the glass walls, I think that could be a good idea,” Chandler said. “Having the cameras there could be a good idea.”

She said creating a mixed gender space isn’t the solution.

“We can imagine what teenagers can get up to,” Chandler said. “I think another consequence is over time, this becomes the norm. Nobody questions anymore why we’ve taken away women’s spaces.”

Chandler said she doesn’t think it’s too late for the district to change its plans.

“The board can make a change if they choose to do so,” she said. “What that would take is directing the superintendent to come up with the change order and would have a cost involved to add a wall to this design, and we would just approve that cost, that change. So it’s not too late at all, even if the building, the restroom was completely done being constructed, we would still be able to make a change like that.”

Stringham said they’re treating the restrooms at these two locations like a pilot program.

“We’ll see if this is an effective measure and we can maybe move forward in future designs of implementing more of those,” she said. “If we’re seeing that students are just not using these because they’re not comfortable, we can look at, depending on where our funding is, we can look at modifying those and making them so students do feel comfortable and do feel safe using them.”