"Who are we? The youth! What do we want? The truth!" they chanted in unison.

The students said they decided to take an active stand in hopes of improving conditions that they consider unbearable.

The students’ list of demands for improvement include keeping the restrooms well-supplied with toilet paper, soap, paper towels and feminine hygiene products; repairing broken stall doors and toilets; installing mirrors and having clean running hot water accessible in all school restrooms. Additionally, in gym locker rooms, the students are requesting showers with dividing curtains. Finally, they want all bathrooms to be cleaned a minimum of once a day.

Restroom accessibility during the school day is also an issue at some schools. Jasmine Caviness, a ninth grader at Coolidge Senior High School, said that there is only one unlocked restroom on the ground floor for all of her school’s 800 students.

The students stood outside with their signs and megaphones, waiting to attract some attention from D.C. Board of Education members. One student expressed his concern over the state of his school restroom, where it took six months to repair a fungus-covered, collapsed ceiling.

"Do you have to work in those kind of conditions?" he yelled to listeners everywhere, "cause I do!"

The students were joined in protest by members of the Youth Education Alliance (YEA), which has worked with the students, training them in campaign organization. Victoria Perez, community organizer for YEA, said that her group has been working on this issue for months with several school officials, but their demands haven’t been met.

The students organized a petition with 900 signatures and presented it at a public dialogue on May 3. Since the meeting, Gregory Williams, deputy director of operations and maintenance, and his team conducted some minor repairs, such as fixing and replacing broken toilet seats at Coolidge and M.M. Washington Career Senior High School.

The state of the school system’s restrooms has been a controversial topic for years. In March 1999, The Common Denominator reported that Mayor Anthony A. Williams was seeking $25 million to fund needed restroom repairs during fiscal 2000. Yet, it remains unclear if any substantial repairs were actually made. Many school officials are still questioning where the money went.

In 1999, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers also planned to make restroom repairs at six of D.C.’s high schools. Scholl board member William Lockridge, who chairs the Committee on Finance and Facilities, said that many restrooms still have issues, a result of poor workmanship.

There "should have been a standard set," Lockridge said, referring to the materials and types of repairs that were done, such as stall doors that were put in place. Some restrooms were given "saloon-type" doors, which he said have poor hinges that break easily.

Lack of adequate funding has prevented DCPS from being able to fund restroom reconstruction in a timely manner, officials said.

"The resources are a factor and I wish they weren’t," said Sarah Woodhead, executive director of facilities, who added that decades of under-investment, neglect and extremely restrained funds have compounded the problem in the city schools.

The school system’s 10-year plan to modernize city schools also faces an additional funding shortage in upcoming years. However, the more pressing issues for the students right now are maintenance issues dealing with cleanliness, supplies and repairs.

"We still need to invest on those short-term things," Woodhead said.

The fiscal 2003 revised operational budget totals $17,098,598 for day-to-day maintenance and repair costs for the public schools. The maintenance program’s budget will not be increased for fiscal 2004, Woodhead said.

"There’s a serious problem in funding between what the school system says they need and what the mayor and the council says is available to them," said Jordan Spooner, director of D.C. programs for the 21st Century School Fund.

The protesting students eventually got some attention from school officials. A meeting originally scheduled for July 11 between YEA and Lockridge was held immediately after the protest. Students from School Without Walls, Cardozo, Anacostia and Banneker high schools met with Lockridge, along with other school officials. Officials concluded that, in upcoming weeks, they would assess the cost of repairs needed for D.C. public high school restrooms.

"Before we make a commitment that speaks to exactly what repairs can be made in a certain amount of time, we need to assess every bathroom in every school in the city and be able to attach a dollar figure to those repairs," said Elena Temple, a spokesman for the Board of Education.

Copyright 2003, The Common Denominator