Journal Inquirer Towns Vernon RHS bathrooms get fixes after decades of disrepair

Journal Inquirer Towns Vernon RHS bathrooms get fixes after decades of disrepair


VERNON — Using the bathroom at Rockville High School has been something of a challenge during the last few decades.

That’s because the majority of the school’s 10 bathrooms — five for boys and five for girls — have been closed periodically due to vandalism so severe that the facilities were deemed unsafe for students.

“It’s an issue,” Principal Eric Baim said Friday, acknowledging that during the last 20 years or so students would rip sinks off the walls, tear down partitions, chip away tiles, start fires, smash mirrors, and generally do everything possible to make a bathroom unfit for use.

Four bathrooms, two male and two female, are currently open throughout the day, and one pair is on the first floor while the other is on the second floor, Baim said.

But thanks to an appropriation of $50,000 from the Board of Education’s capital nonrecurring fund, which was approved by the Town Council on Tuesday, the other three pairs of locked bathrooms soon will be reopened and given a serious renovation.

Though the comment got a chuckle out of the council, Krupienski wasn’t far from the truth, and Baim said one bathroom in particular has been closed for at least 15 years, if not longer. That bathroom was so damaged, and so much of its useable materials had been poached for other repairs over the years, that, Baim said, it’s little more than an empty room with bare plumbing.

“We are going to be upgrading some bathrooms that have been locked up due to safety concerns,” Baim said, adding that planned repairs include replacing toilets, sinks, tile, and partitions. “Now that that’s approved, it’s going to help out.”

The isolated location of several of the bathrooms made it difficult for teachers to monitor the activity going on inside, so those facilities became the domain of smokers and others to escape between class.

In May 2006, police arrested two female students who had gotten into a fight in a bathroom. One of the students was found to be in possession of plastic bags often used to package drugs, a straw with powder residue on it, and two narcotic pills for which she did not have a prescription.

Through the years, the bathrooms also became strongholds in a turf war among loose-knit student gangs that used the facilities as hangout spots, assigning someone to keep watch in case school administrators poked their heads in.

By destroying certain restrooms to the point where they’d be permanently locked, the vandals narrowed down students’ available options and used intimation to control who could enter and when.

At times, all of the students at the school were forced to use the only open, functional restrooms across from the school’s main office because it was the one bathroom frequently monitored by administrators.

But vandals often kept even that bathroom from being used by the general student population through threats, so the school nurse sometimes would allow students to use her bathroom instead.

The layout of the school is far different now than it was then, however, following massive renovations during the summer of 2008.

Because the school’s auditorium is only open for performances, bathrooms there are off-limits on a normal school day, and locker room bathrooms also are closed during classes because student-athletes store personal belongings there, Baim said.

The detached building that houses the regional vocational-agriculture program also has its own bathroom facilities separate from the main school, he added.

Baim said that in the five years he’s been at the school, he’s only seen graffiti and smoking in the bathrooms, rather than the more destructive, violent vandalism of decades past.

And in the last two years, administrators have not had to close any additional bathrooms, thanks to the installation of 160 surveillance cameras at strategic points around the school both indoors and outside.

Now, when someone catches a whiff of cigarette smoke, “we go right to the video and we usually get whoever the kids are and investigate,” Baim said.

The cameras also proved their worth after the spring band concert when Baim used footage from several angles to track the movements of a young Coventry man later charged with exposing himself to a woman who was alone in an empty hallway.

Since the cameras have been installed, vandalism and mayhem at the school has been “very minimal, and the kids respect it,” Baim said. “I tell them that at the beginning of the year, you need to respect where you are and be responsible for it.”