Paper towel needed in school bathrooms

In the bathrooms at Gull Lake High School, motion sensing hand dryers are used.  Although the systems are much more environmentally friendly and are likely to be cheaper for the school, they are causing bad hygiene throughout the student body. 

These air drying systems take a long time to fully dry your wet hands, so many students simply do not dry their hands or even wash them in the first place.  Also, when students leave their hands half dry, they likely end up wiping their hands on the back of their jeans or sleeves, placing germs back onto their hands.  This creates an unsanitary environment that could easily be fixed with the removal of these systems.

In order to solve this problem, the school should replace the drying systems with paper towel dispensers.  If paper towels were present in the bathrooms, more students would wash their hands because it would be easier to dry them. If students did not have to wait for the motion detector, they would spend less time in the bathroom, giving them more time to get to class on time and reducing student tardies. 

A possible solution to this issue could be to fix the current hand drying systems so that they are more efficient, but I would not recommend this idea because it would tend to be expensive; simply adding paper towels to the bathroom would be a much better solution.

Lastly, in regards to the school not being able to afford the paper towel, I have found that many students do not feel like waiting for the present drying systems, they simply use the toilet paper in the stalls. Overall, the school would not be spending more money because instead of using toilet paper they would be using paper towel. 

 

by Cammy Murray

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