The school is watching you. Whether you’re having a mental breakdown, or you simply need to use the bathroom; it doesn’t matter.  Every student has been given an ID.  It’s a plastic card with the name of the school, the year, your grade, and your name. However, it also has a barcode. When you enter the school, every student has to sign in using this barcode, but recently a new addition has been made. The school now wants us to use the ID to scan in for the bathrooms, the library, and if you leave the school during lunch.  The bathroom ID scans have limited students’ bathroom time to less than two minutes.

Bathroom scanning includes many compelling advantages, one of which is crowd reduction in bathrooms. Without the freedom of entering the bathroom for however long whenever pleased, students must now abide by the time limit, therefore reducing the amount of students in the bathroom at once. Aside from crowd reduction, this new addition to our school bathrooms also allows for teachers and students to be more aware of the time students are spending in the bathroom. It ensures that the bathroom is only being used for its original purpose with close monitoring. Although this new addition may take a while for students to get used to, it is clear that it has its advantages beyond just efficiency. 

Though scanning is helpful for teachers, many students claim it’s a useless addition and even find conflicts with it. “I think it’s annoying because I keep my ID attached to my bag and I have to take it out of my holder. But then I forget to put it back in the holder because I left it in my pants which are now at home. So I think it’s inconvenient, ” said one student we spoke to.  Not only do students find it an unnecessary addition that just bothers them, but they point out that other students still manage to skip class, even though that’s the whole point of the IDs. “Everybody finds a way to skip class. The bathroom scanning doesn’t change it,” replied a student named Giancarlo when asked about this topic. When interviewing students, many stated that it was annoying, inconvenient, and that it hasn’t really made a difference. However some students have also said that it doesn’t matter, and hasn’t impacted them in general. However there have been some students who have agreed with the change.

Despite these differences in opinions towards this new change, this addition to the school has come for the better or the worse, and has affected every student in different ways, and for now, will continue to be a part of how Wantagh High school runs the bathrooms.