Asking your teacher if you can step out for a bathroom break during class no longer requires simply raising your hand at Eagle Ridge Academy, a charter school in Brighton, where a new rule mandates that kids present their student ID before dashing to the restroom.
What happens if you forget your ID at home?
You’ll have to wait — and also attend what’s known as Friday school, staying after the last bell of the week to help clean the school, including picking up trash in classrooms and scraping old gum off the bottom of desks.
The school policy has frustrated and confounded students, some of whom say they’re forced to skip a much-needed visit to the bathroom for at least half the school day. Among them is sophomore Ailyn Torres, who particularly worries about female students at Eagle Ridge Academy not being able to use the bathroom when the need arises. Ailyn, 15, started a change.org petition Wednesday that has since gathered more than 250 signatures.
“Girls have a lot of necessities,” she said. “Sometimes we have emergencies, and we’re supposed to just sit there and wait until the bell rings?”
Students are free to use restrooms without first presenting an ID only in the few minutes between classes.
The student ID policy, introduced this semester, is primarily aimed at keeping students safe and curbing a tendency among some students to dawdle in the restroom and even commit vandalism, according to Principal Scott Richardson.
Students must also show their ID to get their meal at lunch, a half-hour period — which has cut down on the time it takes to serve lunch, Richardson said.
“Going to IDs tremendously reduced the number of students loitering in restrooms, increased responsible and appropriate restroom use, increased the speed of the lunch line, and improved the school’s ability to provide a safe atmosphere for all students,” he wrote in an email to The Colorado Sun.
The school has also reported “a huge decrease” in acts of vandalism in restrooms, he wrote.
Eagle Ridge Academy, which opened in 2010, launched the bathroom policy as part of the 5 Star Student tracking system that assigns each student a unique barcode. A student’s barcode enables them to scan their ID at events and lunch and helps the school monitor when students attend tutoring, games and student activities, and also reward kids for “positive behaviors,” Richardson wrote.
The school had recorded an uptick in the number of kids loitering in bathrooms to the extent that some students confronted administrators “stating that we needed to do something to help them eliminate the loitering so that they could appropriately use the facilities,” Richardson wrote.
Now, students’ IDs also act as hall passes to run to the bathroom during class. Students approach a Chromebook and scanner in their classroom and scan the barcode on their ID before leaving. When they return, they also scan their barcode to indicate they’re back in class.
The school put the rule into effect through “a slow rollout process” and notified students and families of the new plans through multiple emails, Richardson wrote.
“Probably the most important part for us as a school is the safety piece,” he added. “God forbid anything ever happens here, but we now have the capability to know exactly which students are out of the classroom or building ensuring better communication with emergency services during an emergency or with parents during the reunification process.”
But teens say the new bathroom rule has also made the periods between classes much trickier for the school’s 550 high school students, who share four girls’ restrooms, four boys’ restrooms and one bathroom that is designated as all gender.
Bathrooms have become extra crowded during the five-minute breaks between classes, with long lines forming and “preventing some from using the bathroom for several hours,” Ailyn wrote in the petition.
Richardson called that “an inaccurate statement,” insisting that since student IDs became hall passes, lines have dwindled “as students are no longer loitering in the restrooms, preventing those that have to use the facilities from doing so.”
Ailyn said one day last week about four hours passed before she could use the bathroom.
“It just really frustrated me and pushed my last button,” Ailyn said.
A lesson in responsibility or a punishment?
Brighton High School, which has nearly 1,800 students, revised its hall pass system this school year as did two other traditional high schools and an alternative high school in School District 27J, according to Principal Shelly Genereux.
The school adopted an e-hall pass system through which students request a bathroom break during class on their Chromebooks. The system tells students how many of their peers are already in the bathroom and, if bathrooms are full, they must wait until a student is done.
Genereux said the school has struggled with kids hanging around in the bathroom — vaping, doing their makeup and fixing their hair.
“I think just about every school has,” she said.
The new system reinforces safety for the entire school and provides “a way just to make sure that we know where kids are at all times,” Genereux said, adding that campus supervisors constantly check bathrooms during class periods to shuffle kids along.
School bathroom policies have long been a common part of administrators’ to-do lists and became a more urgent priority a few years ago, when kids jumped onto a TikTok trend of destroying school bathrooms, said Jubal Yennie, executive director of the Colorado Association of School Boards.
He sympathizes with the challenge of school leaders to balance student freedom and wellbeing and overall school safety.
“This is a good opportunity for administration to work with teachers and students to be able to have students come up with some solutions that are good for students as well,” Yennie said.
Ailyn is trying.
Through the petition, she proposes an alternative solution: “a more targeted approach where only those found misusing bathroom privileges are held accountable rather than implementing blanket rules that affect all students.”
Students want school leaders to “prioritize student welfare over stringent regulations,” she writes in the petition.
Other restrictions at Eagle Ridge Academy also complicate bathroom visits, Ailyn says, including a policy known as the “10-10 rule,” which bars students from going to the bathroom for the first and last 10 minutes of class.
Additionally, if 10 students in the school are out of class using the bathroom at any given time, no other student can use the bathroom until at least one of them returns to class and scans their ID, Ailyn said.
The beginning and end of classes offer “key formative assessment opportunities to gauge student understanding and mastery,” Richardson wrote. Meanwhile, the school limits 10 students to the bathroom at one time during individual class periods to “maximize instructional time,” according to Richardson.
Teachers can override either rule if a student has an emergency need, he wrote.
The mandate to scan student IDs to get lunch is equally exasperating to students like Ailyn, who said she had to jump out of the long cafeteria line one recent day to grab her ID. By the time she got back in line and had her meal in hand, she had 10 minutes to both eat and stop in the bathroom.
Ailyn said she understands that school staff rely on a student ID system to help keep everyone safe, something she appreciates, and that educators and administrators want students to learn how to be responsible by bringing their ID to school every day. But she also believes there is a better approach.
“I know that we’re young adults and they’re trying to teach us,” she said, “but I just feel like that way is not really the way to start teaching us to be responsible.”
The school did not move forward with the new policies as a punishment, Richardson said. Nor does he view Friday school as a punitive measure. Friday school is rooted in the “restorative practice of community service,” he wrote, as students help the athletics and activities department prepare for events and help the facilities team organize and clean. Friday school, assigned to students who don’t have their ID with them, also strengthens relationships between staff and students and teaches kids “both personal and community responsibility,” Richardson wrote.
Ailyn launched the petition despite sharing other students’ fear of getting suspended or being assigned Friday school for voicing criticisms of school policies.
“I feel like that was a good formal way to approach the situation instead of going to the school angry and pointing fingers,” she said. “I wanted to have a reasonable reason of why I’m doing this, not only for me but for other students who are afraid of speaking up.”
As a former social studies teacher, Richardson said he is proud of students for exercising their rights and collecting signatures “in a peaceful manner.” Eagle Ridge Academy has created an environment where students feel comfortable expressing their concerns to staff, he wrote. Students have approached staff “numerous” times and the school pursues student feedback through surveys and incorporates their input in decisions, according to Richardson.
“While I understand students may be frustrated,” he wrote, “IDs are a part of adult life and we are teaching them to be responsible citizens.”