Disgusting.
Yeah, that’s usually the word that comes to mind when students get the feeling they need to pee. They strut around doing the “ants in your pants” dance dreading the campus bathrooms.
Low and behold, there’s absolutely no toilet seat covers when they get there. Still dancing, they frantically look around for extra toilet paper-putting down toilet paper piece by piece on the seat won’t take long at all!
As the student reaches for the paper, they face another let down. The one roll of toilet paper in the entire bathroom is completely unraveled and strewn across all three other stalls, the whole of it now sitting in an unruly puddle of water. They look down at the toilet. It’s grimy and looks like someone smeared mud on it. Some look as if it’s been urinated on a time or two … and never wiped clean.
This frightful scenario is quite common when it comes to the FCC campus bathrooms. “They’re always out of toilet seat covers,” said FCC student Madeline Wainscott.
Why are our bathrooms so filthy? A few reasons: The first being the budget cuts FCC has had to live with. Cynthia Azari, President of Fresno City College, confirmed that the budget has cost them some custodial positions. “We have had positions go unfunded in the past few years”, she said.
Juan Bravo, Building Services Manager, explains that there still are many people working to upkeep the conditions of the bathrooms at all times. “The restrooms are cleaned on three different shifts. We have three Custodians during the daytime shift of 6:00 am to 2:30 pm that are assigned to check restrooms. We have another six Custodians that work on the early morning shift that service the restrooms in their assigned areas from 4:00 am to 12:30 pm. We then have two Custodians that come in at 1:30 pm to 10:00 pm servicing restrooms. We have another eleven Custodians that come in at 3:30 pm to 12:00 am that service restrooms in their areas and the building next to theirs.”
If there are so many custodians working diligently throughout the day, then why are they still so vile and unsanitary, no matter what time of the day you need to go?
“It’s disgusting to even walk around in some of them. There’s all this dirt mixed with water and it smells,” said student Kristina Purcell. “It’s obvious that it’s the student’s messes.”
There is no doubt that the students have a lot to do with the bathrooms being so filthy. “We cannot keep up with the way the students leave the restrooms on all shifts,” said President Azari.
The custodians do pick up trash, refill dispensers, and wipe things down. However, they cannot possibly keep up with the amount of traffic that carelessly goes into the restrooms at all times during the day. Students are throwing things around, splashing water everywhere, not flushing after doing you know what and even leaving graffiti.
“The dispensers are also being pulled off the walls, broken into and the paper stock taken, we have even had students urinate on new rolls of toilet tissue that had just been stocked,” President Azari noted. “Sometimes we will have the rolls of toilet tissue just rolled off the dispenser and placed in the toilet or bunched up in the corner in a pile for no apparent reason,” she added.
The conditions of the restrooms obviously show the culture we have here at Fresno City College. Any given stall you’ll find paragraphs of philosophical sayings, hearts with initials in them, or just blurbs written from one dumper to the next. It’s amazing how much damage one student can do while sitting on a campus toilet for five minutes.
In reality, the custodians do the best they can. But when students are degrading themselves enough to urinate on a full roll of new toilet paper, there’s obviously a bigger issue at hand that needs to be dealt with.
“We as students need to take responsibility for the conditions of the campus restrooms, ” says Sergey Saluchev, FCC’s Associated Student Body President.
At around 7 AM, the restrooms are generally stocked, clean, and typically don’t have hair in the sink or dirty water on the floors-not yet anyway.
According to Juan Bravo, this is probably because they have just been thoroughly cleaned by the night time custodians. “On the graveyard shift of 10:30 pm to 7:00 am, we have nine Custodians that deep clean their restrooms. We have a Lead Custodian on each shift and they make their rounds on campus checking on the custodians and their buildings, which include all the restrooms on campus.”
The same restrooms around, say, lunchtime, look as if their world was turned upside down.
The bottom line and basic reality is exactly what our ASG President suggested: Students need to take responsibility. Trash is meant to go in the trashcans, not on the floor. Tampon wrappers and applicators can easily be thrown in the stall’s drop box, not on top of it or, worse, attempted to be flushed down the toilet. Student’s need no write their boyfriend or girlfriend’s name surrounded by a heart on the stalls, or the name of their “posse”. And lastly, flushing the toilet before you exit the stall is not only polite, it’s a personally hygienic thing to do.
On the bright side, students shouldn’t lose hope of being able to do their business in cleanly conditions-there are some good alternatives. The bathrooms in the library have plenty of stalls and are generally well kept. Restrooms can be found near the auto and Technology buildings that are actually very nice; they have up to date dispensers, clean tile, and nothing has yet to be ripped off the walls.
There are many bathrooms at FCC that aren’t always as bad as mentioned above, and sometimes students can hit it right after cleaning. FCC students and staff should explore different buildings to find a restroom that suits their standards. Happy hunting.