With the new changes to bathroom and hallway policies, and with 2,000 students at Venice, there’s bound to be disorder and inconveniences. Although the school has reasonable cause for these new rules, they’re still pretty disruptive and irritable.

One of the new regulations that has received the most backlash from students are bathroom regulations. Many bathrooms across campus have been closed for a significant portion of the semester. This seems like a good way to reduce any possible disorder in the bathrooms, but restricting them just causes new problems.

Bathrooms are now overcrowded during lunch and nutrition, sometimes with lines that disrupt hallway traffic. Students are encouraged to use the bathrooms during breaks, but if there’s too many people, they will often wait to go during the middle of class.

The bathroom closures are really inconvenient, especially because now it’s a gamble going to the bathroom—it’s difficult to remember which ones are open and which ones are closed.  And our big Venice campus certainly doesn’t help. Additionally, if the same bathrooms are always closed, then what’s the point of having those bathrooms in the first place?

Another new rule is related to the length of bathroom breaks. Students are not able to leave class during the first or last 15 minutes of each, and only one person is allowed to leave at a time. These rules were enacted to ensure that students wouldn’t use the break to miss most of class. But now during class, time could be wasted on teachers and students scrambling to figure things out.

Who has the pass? Did they come back from the bathroom yet? Has it been 15 minutes yet? 

Throughout classes, I’ve seen just this constant back and forth between students and teachers. Students sit waiting for their turn to take the hall pass, wondering when the student who’s out will be back. And teachers are forced to keep track and make sure that students are signing the pass and which students are out. All these interruptions and confusions just seem excessive for just one class. 

Overall, these rules don’t seem permanent, so they only serve as a nuisance for now. The whole hall pass debacle seems to be very unpopular among students from what I’ve seen, and it’s pretty easy to see why. 

These rules aren’t the end of the world, but they just make things more complicated. With limited bathrooms and tedious pass regulations, we can only hope that these rules will pass and we can go back to our ordinary routine.