Bathrooms at Hickman are often closed, dysfunctional, and dirty such as one mens bathroom across room 223, which has no working stall doors..
This is not the case at all schools in the CPS district and this year the Leadership Council is trying to get funding to improve them.
Ellen Wilson, a member of the leadership council, explained that the council is a group of five teachers and one counselor at Hickman and described what they do.
Wilson said that they are elected by the faculty to, “Advocate for what we think will make teachers’ work environment better.”
In this case, the Leadership Council is attempting to secure funding to improve bathrooms at Hickman which some believe to not be as clean and functional as other school’s bathrooms.
“It’s really striking how much newer and nicer everyone’s bathrooms are in other high schools,” Wilson said
Some bathrooms in Hickman are in better shape than others. Millie Cornish (10), who has classes in bathrooms in the Career Center wing and the Fine Arts building.
“The Career Center wing bathrooms are really nice, but sometimes in the Fine Arts bathrooms, things are falling apart,” Millie said.
Millie talked about how the issues with the Fine Arts building’s bathrooms extend past looks.
“The sink got clogged a lot, and it would be like five inches [deep],” Millie said.
The sinks and toilets not working or not being clean is not just impractical. Funding for the bathrooms would also heighten morale.
“We’re thinking more about human dignity,” Wilson said. “[So students can be] going to the bathroom [in a] private and safe and clean way.”
However, fixing the bathrooms could be disruptive because if the bathroom is closed it can’t be used.
Ryan Reedy (11) said he believed they should, “pick one bathroom, close it and fix it and then reopen it before you close the next one so that they’re still available.”
Ryan also thinks there is an issue with the people who use the bathrooms.
“They’re not great. There’s a lot of poor behavior in them,” Ryan said.
Another difficulty is that not all bathrooms are equally used or in the same condition.
“The reality of the bathrooms at Hickman is that the bathrooms that get used the most, so on the east side, where the classes are, are in the worst shape,” Wilson said.
Wilson said that the council explained this to people at the district level.
Wilson wants the district to “think about us and our needs [when] they are making decisions about money.”
Wilson is optimistic that the bathrooms at Hickman getting funding is more likely due to them explaining this to people at the district.
“We did succeed in making people aware that this is like a high priority for us, where I don’t think that had really been on the radar [before],” Wilson said.
