South Western’s elected school board is making some strange decisions.
For the last two years, they’ve fixated on which bathrooms LGBTQ+ kids use. In 2023, officials in this Hanover-area district played musical chairs with school bathrooms in a misguided attempt to appease the loudest bigots among them — ending up with five different types of bathrooms.
After a low-turnout school board election in which several far-right members joined their ranks, they hired a Christian law firm, decided to begin banning books and reopened the bathroom issue. Board President Matthew Gelazela, who was elevated to his post after previously serving as the board’s most vocal bomb-thrower, pointed to Red Lion’s discriminatory policies as something to aspire to.
Now, upon the advice of that law firm — the Harrisburg-based Independence Law Center — the board approved spending $8,700 to cut windows so passersby can look into the so-called “gender-identity” student bathrooms.
Ok, I’ll explain that a little better: the place where you take a shit is a private space. The place where you wash your hands is a public space.
In a normal restroom, it is permissible to be partially undressed outside of the stalls, but within the hand washing area of the restroom, as that can be considered a changing area, like a locker room.
With the addition of the window, there is no longer a place that can be considered a “changing area” outside the stalls. If they built proper walls and used proper doors for the “stalls”, they just made some private restrooms next to some public sinks.
The discourse around this is very confusing, especially as a non American who has never been in an American school bathroom.
What you’re describing sounds like a normal public toilet set up in my country
There’s a hallway or doorway into an open space with mirrors sinks and hand dryers, sometimes that hallway has a door to it, but often it’s just an open door frame. Sometimes they’ll put a 90 degree turn in the hall to obscure looking straight in, but not always.
Behind the sinks are private stalls. At more expensive locations they’ll have semiambulant stalls, some will even have their own sink inside the stall so that the full access toilet and wash room can be available to those who can’t ambulate.
(full access toilets and wash rooms are entirely seperate from the sink and stalls)
The sink area is often still segregated by gender at older establishments, but anyone walking past could glimpse in and see /shock fully dressed people washing their hands!
From the school restrooms I’ve seen depicted in various British TV shows, there isn’t much physical difference. The only practical difference is that males, females, and various other genders might be washing hands in the same room at the same time. Now with a window to remind everyone that the sink area is a public space, and isn’t to be used as a changing area.