LAKE OSWEGO, Ore. — Some parents in Lake Oswego are worked up over plans for the bathrooms at their kids' new middle school.
Lakeridge Middle School is being rebuilt and the plan calls for gender-neutral, all-user bathroom stalls with communal sinks.
More than 750 people have signed an open online petition trying to halt design plans before construction is done and the new and improved Lakeridge Middle School opens in the fall. Some parents say the school needs to take into account bullying, sexual assault, consensual sex, self-harm and drugs.
The school has an enrollment of about 800 students.
The Lakeridge Middle School principal said he is listening to parents’ concerns but it is too late - the new bathroom design is moving forward.
The new school will be state-of-the-art with a more sustainable, interactive building that school staff hopes promotes equity.
A part of that equity is all-user, gender neutral bathrooms.
"The goal of the whole school is to create a safe, learner-centric, equitable, inclusive environment for all our students and the bathrooms are part of that overall design," principal Kurt Schultz said. "So, one of the things we wanted to make sure we were doing is creating safe spaces for all kids and facilities they could use and then get on their way back to class, back to learning."
Schultz says the individual toilet rooms will be totally private with floor to ceiling walls and doors. The sinks are in an open communal area that is visible from the hall for supervision.
"It increases access for all kids to access spaces that are safe and open so that we don’t have situations where kids are congregating in an unsupervised bathroom like we currently do," Schultz said.
But some parents don’t think the new accessible bathrooms will be safer.
"I respect the gender-neutral situation. What I would like to see is individual bathrooms created. Not a family-style bathroom created for sixth, seventh, eighth graders to use. That doesn’t feel like a safe situation for us," said Jennifer Askew, whose son is in eighth grade. "I think that middle school is such an awkward weird stage anyway and to have to worry about going into a restroom and coming out of a stall and maybe seeing something you didn’t think you were going to see."
Askew is concerned that boys and girls will be sharing a bathroom and worried the sink area isn't private enough, while the stalls are too private.
"It is isolated, which is great for privacy. But it is isolated to the point where if there’s children choosing to do poor choices, whether it's drugs, alcohol, sex - whether it's solicited or not - could lead to problems," she said.
Parents want the school to take all those potential problems into account, along with bullying, assault, and self-harm.
"It is something we talk about. We try to think about all possibilities and one of the things we know we have to do in every scenario is think through what are implications of the design," Schultz told KGW. "So, we make sure we have supervision plans and safety protocols in place to keep everybody safe and help everyone understand how the new spaces are going to work."
Schultz says there is a difference between "bathroom problems and people problems." He says bullying, harassment and drug use are obviously issues they don't want occurring, and are problems the school community - and community at large - needs to address and work through.
This is the future of new school construction, he said. He wants to assure Lakeridge parents that they've learned from other schools that have incorporated similar designs, such as Grant High School in Portland and schools in Washington state.
Schultz said if anything, the new design has more open space that allows staff to better supervise bathrooms. In the traditional layout currently in place, he says he finds kids gathered in groups behind a wall or corner during class.
But like many other parents, Askew said the future can focus on inclusivity but it doesn’t need to look like this.
"We want to respect those kids but we also need to respect the kids who want to go to the bathroom with boys [in the same bathroom] and girls in the same bathroom. So could it be done differently? Is this the way that It needs to be done?" Askew asked.