YORK COUNTY, Pa. — One week after parents in one York County School District raised concerns over a restyle to one of the school's gender-neutral bathrooms, the school is standing behind the change.
At Wednesday night's South Western School Board Meeting, school officials addressed criticism they received after a window was cut into a gender-neutral bathroom at the middle school. The window looked into the common area of the bathroom, keeping the stalls private.
The change was intended to prevent activities such as vaping, drug use or bullying from taking place.
However, some parents voiced complaints about the window, which were discussed at tonight's meeting.
"This is our district," said board member Matthew Smith. "How long is it going to take to wash this stain off? It has become obvious contempt for people whose beliefs are different and it's hard to imagine that it has not impacted the students and teachers. Neither politics nor religion belong in the school board."
South Western School Board President Mathew Gelazela issued the following statement regarding the concerns:
"Many European nations have gender-neutral restrooms. However, these spaces almost always consist of full floor-to-ceiling privacy. The previous board decided to re-designate some regular restrooms as gender-neutral options. I am on record opposing those changes. But worse, the district at that time simply changed the signs to denote they were now gender inclusive, but never took any measures to actually protect the privacy of students. These restrooms were originally designed for use by the same sex and had stalls with large gaps. Not only that, they also had three urinals with almost zero privacy in the middle school. These did not provide the higher privacy we expect.
One of our high school restrooms was the first to be completed because that building is undergoing a massive renovation which allowed us to easily install block walls around each stall. I am calling this effort our “stalls to walls” modifications.
While we intended to add more privacy for our students in the middle school by “stalls to walls” changes, we were NOT conducting a complete renovation of this entire building. Putting in block enclosures would have been more difficult and costly and would have involved plumbing changes. We sought instead to achieve full privacy using European-style floor-to-ceiling walls as is very common in many European nations.
We also ran into difficulties installing these floor-to-ceiling walls in the middle school. There are HVAC intake and exhaust vents in the ceilings that need to be relocated to bring the enclosures around each toilet up to the ceiling. The manufacturer of the full privacy walls was unable to fulfill the order until well into the future, possibly even the next summer.
Board members discussed ensuring privacy by installing stalls with doors around the urinals and increasing the height of the existing stalls, so we did not have to redo the ventilation or lighting in the middle school restrooms. We should have been more patient and simply encouraged waiting for the discussion with the manufacturers to continue.
I want to take sole responsibility in one regard here. I personally approved opening the walls prior to that board approval to make them as our elementary school restrooms have existed for almost two decades. This was not at the advice from other board members, administrators or our attorneys to begin that wall opening. My intent was to empower our administration to prevent bullying and discourage other misbehaviors. I do believe moving from stalls to walls first would have been the best course. To correct this, we’ve closed the opening."
