The bell rang, the teacher commenced her lecture and the students started taking notes. All of a sudden I began to feel an urgent and overwhelming need to empty my bladder. I slowly raised my hands for permission. Unfortunately, the teacher’s response was “NO.” I began to feel highly restless and my legs started to shiver. Each time the teacher clicked  through the PowerPoint on the SmartBoard, my eyes rolled toward the clock on the wall, eagerly waiting for the bell to ring.  AT LAST !! The bell rang. I ran as fast as I could, like a bird fleeing from its cage.

Since the beginning of this academic year, Parkway South has deprived students of the privilege of using the bathroom during class hours. Many students and some teachers feel very uncomfortable about this rule, but administrators say they have a reason as to why this law is in effect.

Some students have been known to send text messages to their friends planning to hang out during class hours, choosing a bathroom as their meeting place. In order to bring such activities under control, the administration decided to enforce this law along with locking a few bathrooms.

Ironically, some teachers tend not to care about this new rule and let the students go to the bathroom whenever necessary.  But some teachers scrupulously follow it.

Some common responses by teachers when students are seeking permission to use the restroom during class time are, “you had time between the classes”,”the class has just started”, “you are coming from lunch” or “you can go when the class ends.” Students in a school like Parkway South High know it takes about 5-7 minutes to walk from one class to another during the seven minute gap between two classes. The hallways and bathrooms are crowded most of the time between class hours. Buying food in the cafeteria requires standing in long lines which make it hard to leave just the right amount of time to eat. This means we would have to skip lunch if we were to use the restrooms during lunchtime.

In my opinion this rule should be eliminated because going to the bathroom is a completely natural processes to allow our bodies to eliminate waste products.

As with many things in life, everyone is different, this also applies to normal urinary frequency. For most people, normal urinary frequency is about 6 – 7 times in a 24 hour period, yet between 4 and 10 times a day can also be normal.

According to Dr. Benjamin Brucker, Assistant Professor of Urology at NYU Langone Medical Center, besides causing discomfort, ignoring the urgency to empty the bladder can lead to urine stagnation as well as urinary tract infections. The bladder can become a breeding ground for bacteria.

According to steptohealth.com -a website that gives advice on how to make your health better, those periods of retention can produce severe urinary tract infections due to the germs present in urine that have been sitting too long in the bladder. As time goes on, these infections can spread to the kidneys and lead to much more serious conditions; such as  kidney stones, cystitis, stretching of the urinary bladder wall, swelling of the bladder, and urinary incontinence.

We need to take care to maintain our bladder free of harmful residues and to keep our kidneys in perfect condition. These both are among the most vital organs in our bodies and it is not a good idea to neglect them and risk serious health complications just for the sake of not getting to leave our classroom for a moment to use the bathroom.

Short term, yet serious adverse effects include constant and strong pain when urinating, fever (caused by the effect of the bacteria present in urine that was not properly expelled from the body), shivers, stomach pains, cramps, anxiety, and difficulty concentrating on anything other than the desire to pee, thereby leading to lower test scores.

If the administration thinks students  would use bathroom as a meeting place during class hours, then they should find some other alternative to avoid this from happening. Action should be taken strictly against only those students who are found to be guilty of misusing the given permission to use the restroom during class hours. Monitoring students through cameras which should be located in every hallway and appointing hallway monitors throughout the day should be helpful to solve this problem. Periodic reminders like emails to parents as well as students reminding them to use the bathroom responsibly, warning signs outside bathrooms and permission cards stating timeout/time in that need to be returned to the teacher are other options.

The administration has to be noticing that some teachers are not following this new policy.  Then what is the purpose of keeping this rule in existence? And for the scrupulous followers of this rule, why punish all the students on their basic human right for something done by a minority of students?

Any school, institution or workplace should be giving importance to the body’s natural needs in it’s appropriate time for smooth going life.