Starting April 19th, all of the student bathrooms, besides the all gender and 200 hallway bathrooms have been closed. With this new change, the majority of multi-use stalls are no longer available for student use, making bathroom trips for virtually every student at Dominion inconvenient and difficult.

On April 20th, Dr. Brewer released a statement via email sent out to the Dominion community, where he stated that the reason for this decision was due to the apparent rise of electronic cigarette use among the student body, better known as vaping. According to Brewer’s statement, the regulation of the bathrooms is designed to be able to better monitor this situation. The same email also stated that this would be a temporary solution, although he did not give a date.

Assistant principal Jamie Braxton says that the policy was inspired by discipline data that they had collected. “We realized that a lot of the negative incidents that occured that involved students’ safety were happening in the bathrooms,” Braxton said.

In regards to the bathrooms being much more dirty than usual, Braxton stated that she had confidence that the janitorial team would be able to ensure that things would remain up to standard. She further reiterated that this measure was temporary and it was up to the students to ensure that the incidents decreased so they could return to normal.

The new policy has been extremely controversial with the student body. “It’ll eliminate some [of the vaping problem], but people that were doing it before are still going to do it,” Aaron Haak said. 

Sarah Yohey was also not keen on the policy. While she admits that it might be helpful in deterring vaping in the bathrooms, she stated, “”[The new policy is] very annoying and it makes my school day more difficult.” 

Teacher responses have been mixed as well. While Catherine Edginton states that she supports the policy, she noted, “Students take much longer to use the bathroom and are genuinely frustrated by the inconvenience.” 

“I think many understand the issue, but since we aren’t in the position of the administration, we cannot judge how best to solve it and have to trust that they have looked at all other viable possibilities,” Edginton said.

Lead School Security Officer Tim Macbeth declined to comment on the situation, preferring to state that it was an issue with behavior that they did not wish to discuss.