Posts
You’ve probably heard about the fierce battle over school bathrooms raging across the country. It’s an important story for sure because transgender students should not be blocked from entering facilities of their gender identity.
But the current fight over gender equity shouldn’t take away from another bathroom battle taking place in our nation’s public schools: whether students have access to a functioning bathroom at all.
In Detroit, a local news outlet recently reported bathroom facilities in some schools are in such poor states of repair that teachers are forced to tell students, “No, there’s nowhere in the building to go to the bathroom.”
Physical conditions in Detroit public schools have gotten so bad, teachers created a Twitter campaign showing pictures of broken toilets, leaking ceilings, moldy walls and buckled floors. A prolonged sickout by the teachers finally got the government’s attention, but the legislature is still dithering over the money to fix the schools.
In Philadelphia, a recent audit by the City Controller deemed bathrooms throughout the district “not up to first world standards,” according to a local news report. Inspectors called school conditions in general “dangerous,” and bathrooms “are worse.”
In some school districts, the physical state of the buildings have gotten so bad, community groups organize to take on the maintenance tasks governments won’t provide. In one Kansas community, a high school student resorted to a crowdfunding campaign to raise enough money to fix his school’s bathroom.
Since this is Infrastructure Week, as my colleague Dave Johnson reports, let’s consider an essential infrastructure that’s not talked about as much as roads, bridges, trains, and utilities: education infrastructure. Lets’ examine how schools in so many places have deteriorated to deplorable states, why we drifted away from talking about education as “essential infrastructure,” and what we need to do to get the discussion back on track.
Not Just About Buildings
No comments:
Post a Comment