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Dara, whose real name the Star is not using to protect the identity of her son, contacted the school, which acknowledged ongoing problems and suggested the boy use the single all-gender toilet near an office. Dara was frustrated by the proposed solution. She wondered how, in a school of 500 students, could everyone who was afraid use just one stall?

Her son opted for the single washroom when time and circumstances allowed, but sometimes had to use the larger boys’ room. He would listen at the outside door before entering. He wasn’t targeted, says Dara, but he felt the need “to stay invisible.” He allied himself with friends who were bigger and taller — kids that other kids “wouldn’t mess with.”

“I have a 13-year-old who has to be on alert like he’s in a war zone when he has to go to the bathroom,” says Dara incredulously. “How ridiculous is that?”

As the school year begins this week, the list of worries for students is long, from meeting teachers to making new friends. But the expectation is they are entering a safe place to learn.

That includes feeling secure to go when nature calls, that a child won’t be confronted by a group puffing on e-cigarettes or harassed because of their gender identity or captured on cellphone video doing the most private of acts.

But the reality is that this quasi-public space has increasingly become a battleground where  and adolescents fear to tread.

School boards, from ���ٴ���, have in the last couple years taken to removing entrance doors in the name of safety. Vaping has become so prevalent — ��—�¯�󲹳� the Ontario government recently banned the practice on school property and is funding the installation of vape detectors. And despite school washrooms long mythologized as places to hang, free from supervision — bands have been singing about since the early 1970s — records obtained by the Star from four Greater pc28����Area boards reveal a litany of far more serious incidents and assaults including an X-acto knife held up against the neck of Grade 6 student. 

Vandalism, , has been  — sinks torn off walls; garbage stuffed into soap dispensers; hazardous waste smeared on tiles — that restrooms have had to be closed for days or weeks, custodians and money for repairs not able to keep up.

“I’ve been working for 11 years, and it’s only the last three years that I find that kids — I don’t know if it is because of COVID or what, I have no idea — but the vandalism is getting worse,” says Ginette Poulin, head custodian at a French Catholic high school in Barrie and president of CUPE Local 4340.

pc28����student Jaden Braves says it’s shocking the number of times washrooms in his high school have been shut down, forcing kids to scramble to other floors or even off campus to relieve themselves. “It’s a crazy thing to not have basic standards. If this was in a business, it would be appalling.”

Meanwhile, school boards moving toward embracing universal washrooms in the name of inclusion have faced obstacles and criticism. In May, .

The question of how meeting such a basic physical need became so fraught and what can be done to fix it may, as school returns, get lost amid issues like back-to-basic math or cellphone-use policies.

But, as Western University Assistant Prof. Jennifer Ingrey has observed in her research into school washrooms and gender, the matter is critical.

“If we don’t have space where we can attend to our bodily needs, and that includes every single person in the (school) — people with disabilities or mobility challenges, with specific cultural needs, gender-diverse — then how can we possibly carry on with the business of the day, which is learning and teaching?”

What the data says

One day last year, in the middle of class, a boy’s nose began to bleed. Badly. Blood ran down his shirt.

Sarah, a pc28����public school teacher, told the Grade 9 student to head to the washroom and get cleaned up. The teen refused.

He was afraid. Too many kids would be inside vaping, he told Sarah, who asked to not be fully identified so as not to draw negative attention to her current school when problems with washrooms are endemic — “they have been an issue at every job I’ve taught at, at every school.”

Sarah handed the boy some paper towel to sop up the blood and then chose an escort to accompany him to the washroom. The teen went, reluctantly, but not before Sarah asked the boys in the class if any of them avoided the washrooms for fear of vaping or other issues.

All but one raised their hands.

The Star, in examining data on washroom occurrences at four of Ontario’s largest school boards over the past two years, found reasons for kids to be scared. The tally, some educators say, isn’t even a true sense of the magnitude.  

Peel District School Board, where Dara’s son attends, was most forthcoming to the Star’s freedom-of-information request and provided pages of redacted incidents, including assaults with weapons, that resulted in suspensions or expulsions.

Kids had been intimately filmed and then shamed online; toilet paper had been set alight. Vaping and cannabis use were heavily represented including one case where four kids spent more than 30 minutes in a special-needs washroom, after which it was deemed unusable due to the smell. Last year, Peel installed vaping detectors in six schools as part of pilot project. The board would not confirm whether it is expanding the initiative, despite new provincial funding for vape detectors, which have had varying degrees of success as .

A Peel District spokesperson said they take these incidents “very seriously and we’re committed to providing a safe learning environment for students.”

pc28����Catholic and York Region district school boards refused to disclose individual reports, but York shared that in 2022-23, there were 355 incidents in school washrooms, of which 134 related to vaping. Meanwhile, statistical data from the TCDS revealed a 27 per cent increase in washroom incidents in 2023-24 over the year before, with more than 80 per cent falling into a category described as “conduct injurious to the moral tone of the school or to the physical or mental well-being of others.”

The pc28����District School Board said it couldn’t provide specific records because “incident numbers are not broken down by the locations, in particular, by school washroom.” However, the gives a general indication of where occurrences take place. Schoolyards, hallways and classrooms are the problem spots, followed closely by “Other,” which includes washrooms. The most recent findings (2021-22) revealed 18 per cent of incidents resulting in suspensions or expulsions happened in “Other.”

“There is a breakdown in reporting,” says Sarah, the pc28����teacher. “First, you have young people who don’t want to report an incident, period, to administration. And then you have administration not filing paperwork for every report. So the reporting systems that we have currently do not give any kind of adequate data around this issue.”

She adds that it is tough to prevent conflicts or even catch students in the act due to the fact it is generally taboo for teachers to enter a washroom, and schools don’t have enough safety monitors or child support workers. Compounding the aggression is a .

A TDSB spokesperson says if students “have concerns about their safety in any area of the school, we want them to feel comfortable coming forward to let us know.”

ended up going public with his complaints. The 15-year-old attends Western Technical-Commercial School. In June 2023, only to find them closed. The Instagram post drew seven million views.

He also , demanding that vandalism and hygiene be addressed, noting that if students are always forced to search for usable washrooms, they end up missing big chunks of class.

“Safety and well-being have to come before all the other amazing perks we get in our education,” says Braves, chair of the school’s student council. He says that while administration responded and got washrooms open, there were times again this past year when the facilities had to be shut down.

“It’s an issue larger than the school itself; it’s larger than the administration’s ability to necessarily take action on it because if we can’t get a plumber in to fix a stall or we can’t get a $200,000 grant to redo all the washrooms, nothing will change.”

Edyta McKay, a spokesperson for the minister of education, said that on top of the $30 million for vape detectors and security cameras, the government is funding public education “with an additional $745 million, which boards are responsible to manage and ensure school infrastructure is well maintained.”

Custodian Poulin, who finds it hard to believe things will ever improve, says the status quo is frustrating. “You can clean a washroom and 10 minutes later it’s a big mess again. Kids don’t value the work (required as a result) of their actions. And kids don’t realize the consequences.”

The situation has led some schools to tighten procedures around washroom use. . More extreme measures include or not allowing washroom breaks at all.

Last April, Lyndsey Howell’s two children came home upset about a new rule at their Catholic school in St. Catharines: Students were told they could go to the washrooms only once in the morning and once in the afternoon. They also had to sign a sheet.

“It’s not healthy,” says Howell, whose daughter struggled with an incontinence issue when she was younger. “Holding it for 10 or 20 minutes is fine, but holding it for an hour while in class? I don’t think that’s a good thing for kids to be doing all day.”

She told her children to be respectful and be fast, but to go whenever they needed to, and she alerted administration of her decision. “I appreciate concerns with vandalism, but you should be able to target the people causing the problems rather than blanket-punish everybody,” she says, adding that requiring students to also record their bathroom usage “felt like a violation.”

“I would feel uncomfortable if my work made me sign a sheet.”

Transforming the school washroom

Adam’s daughter was in tears. The kindergartener told him a boy had peeked under her stall while she was going pee earlier that day.

The pc28����dad was caught off-guard by the washroom set-up at his daughter’s school.

Jean Lumb Public School, when it opened in 2020, was the first in the TDSB to have all multi-stall, gender-neutral bathrooms.

The goal was laudable: to promote inclusivity and reduce bullying. But some parents pushed back, worried about privacy and cleanliness. (The board later renovated the stalls, adding taller doors and partitions.)

Adam, whose real name the Star has changed to protect the identity of his child, had no issue with an all-gender option, but he also wanted a girls’ room where his daughter would be comfortable and not have to line up for the single accessible washroom that had been offered up as a solution.

So, despite adhering to another religion, Adam became a Catholic, allowing his daughter to switch to Bishop Macdonell Catholic Elementary School, which shares a building with Jean Lumb but separates washrooms by gender.

Adam’s daughter is now going into her second year at Bishop Macdonell. Adams says converting was an extreme measure, but he did it because “I could do something to make my daughter’s life better.”

Public washrooms, once also segregated by class and race, are one of the last physical spaces in society still separated by gender, and as such,

Even as malls and inch towards universal washroom design, schools have been slow to change.

“When we think children, we think vulnerability, we think we need to protect,” says Prof. Ingrey, explaining the polarization. “This incites quite a bit of emotional response.”

Yet, Ingrey’s research has found that students, particularly gender-diverse youth, consistently bring up the school bathroom as a place of “fear, anxiety and difficulty navigating.”

. found that 60 per cent of transgender people avoid using public restrooms altogether.

It was only just over a decade ago that Toby’s Act added protection of “gender identity” and “gender expression” to the Ontario Human Rights Code.

Around that time, the TDSB enshrined , followed shortly afterward by the opening of the board’s first single all-gender washroom at City View Alternative.

Most schools in the province now have at least one single-stall all-gender washroom, often a former visitor or staff toilet. But it’s a solution criticized for being more performative than substantial.

“It sort of implies that the girls’ washroom or the boys’ washroom should not be allowing for trans kids to come in,” says Ingrey. “It makes it seem as if that trans person is the exception and has to just use this exceptional washroom space. It doesn’t really have a sophisticated or realistic understanding of what gender diversity is.”

One Ontario school board is looking to change that in a big way.

Rainy River District School Board, west of Thunder Bay, is in the process of transforming what the high school washroom looks like, opting for multiple all-gender stalls, with floor-to-ceiling partitions and doors that open up to communal sinks visible from the hallway.

Previously, lineups for standalone universal washrooms were long, says board director Heather Campbell, with students not feeling comfortable using the larger gendered restrooms for “many different reasons,” including vaping, cellphone usage and acts of vandalism.

“Students need to feel safe,” she says. “That sense of physical or psychological safety is so paramount for them to be mentally ready to learn.”

Capital funding, a rebuild of one school, a redesign of another, and the creation of a soon-to-open new building has provided the board with the opportunity to do washrooms differently.

The new design provides privacy but allows for full inclusivity, says Campbell, and sightlines are better, which has also had a big impact on vandalism.

“We’re not having to send a crew to repair a bathroom over and over again,” she says. “Bathrooms are not being shut down and students rediverted elsewhere in the school,” She says, adding that the most important outcome is that all students are able to use the same facilities instead of having to feel singled out for going elsewhere in the school.

But it’s a change that didn’t come easily. Planning for the rebuild of the first high school, Northern Lakes, was well underway in 2018 and included traditionally separated washrooms when the architect brought forth a suggestion.

Ian Hill, principal architect at Critchley Hill Architecture Inc. based in North Bay, had done research into gender-inclusive environments and had seen how well they worked in public buildings in British Columbia. He thought Northern Lakes might be a place to try them locally.

After the board consulted students and parents, the new washroom design was endorsed, but still standing in the way was the Ontario Building Code. Since 1998, the code has required architects to block direct sightlines to “lavatories,” which is the sink area.

“How do you create a safe space when you can’t provide sightlines to it?” says Hill, whose proposal was originally deemed non-compliant by building code officials.

Hill had to advocate for his design in front of the Building Code Commission.

“It is amazing to think that such a simple item has held many architects back from shifting their design,” he says. “I made a decision to contest the old code. It was fundamentally unfair, problematic and in conflict with the OHRC.”

He is thrilled that which comes into effect this January, no longer includes the specific restriction.

“There isn’t anything holding back architects and designers from implementing things we’ve done here.”

Except perhaps cost.

Hill argues that while the approach requires full partitions and doors, as well as exhaust and electrical systems for each stall, the cost is offset by needing far less square footage than is required for traditionally separated spaces. And it doesn’t require a completely new build, either, he says: Existing washrooms could be transformed by a light renovation, opening up an entrance wall to the corridor and adding full stall doors.

But for cash-strapped schools, especially those in century-old buildings that may urgently need a new roof or HVAC system, it is hard to make a case that restroom renovations are a priority. Still, the TDSB is in the process of “developing guidelines for the addition of new — or retrofitting existing washrooms — gender-neutral washrooms.”

Ingrey says finding a solution to the beleaguered school washroom is bigger than design anyway. “I don’t think you can just build a space, especially in a school, and then expect everybody is going to behave appropriately. You have to accompany that with education.”

That’s what helped with the situation at Toronto’s Marc Garneau Collegiate Institute, says student council president Arsal Farook.

Washrooms there have been a  Last December, t acknowledging that the “state of the washrooms continues to be a concern,” and outlined measures to address the complaints, including hiring safety monitors. 

While the principal would not speak to the Star, Farook said administration held information assemblies and hung anti-vaping posters.

“Education is probably the best way to handle this,” says the 17-year-old, noting how important it was for students to learn how their actions were affecting others. Going to the washroom “is not the highlight of your day, but if you can’t go, it can ruin your day.”

For Dara’s son, that is something he has had to learn to manage. He started taking self-defence classes, and has become more confident, says his mom.

“But the washroom is a scary environment, and a 13-year-old shouldn’t have to adapt that way.”