8 ms·

Fresno High tracks student bathroom visits with app. Not everyone likes it

32 points by e12e 3y ago

bediger4000 3y ago
Why do school administrators have such a strong fascination with restroom visits? Appears across geography, and across time. Someone should get to the root of this.
- outside1234 3y ago
  I know you are saying this in jest, but there is a huge amount of bullying and drug use that happens in bathrooms at schools.
  - bluedino 3y ago
    Or just kids who want to wander the halls, etc
  - consp 3y ago
    > bullying As someone who was actually bullied and not heard about it, maybe that's a US thing but to me that never happened in bathrooms and always in the open when teachers were not around.
- horns4lyfe 3y ago
  I’d be willing to bet the root is a few problem kids that abuse bathroom visits, and schools don’t have a way to just deal with problem kids so they just do something broad. As with most things in schools, you should be more upset with parents that don’t teach their kids not to ruin public goods.
  - miah_ 3y ago
    ... I was a problem kid. Believe me, schools have ways to deal with problem kids. It doesn't require installing big brother screens in the toilet. For me the problem was that most schools are all about memorization and thinking inside the box. Switching to a different type of school solved my issues. (smaller classes, more permissive, exploring problems and their solutions with multiple correct answers rather than simply 'memorize this thing, check the box').
    - consp 3y ago
      > smaller classes That's a money issue, not a system issue.
  - joezydeco 3y ago
    We just went through a cycle where an entire nation of TikTok users were shown videos of students vandalizing bathrooms. The larger object you could steal, including entire urinals and toilets, the better. Search on "devious licks" and you'll find dozens of school districts that were fighting this problem. At my local HS the answer was to close most of the bathrooms during class time and monitor visits, since putting live cameras in the bathrooms would cause an even larger uproar. Students always had access to a bathroom during class time, just one up near the admin offices that could be more closely observed.
    - I_Am_Nous 3y ago
      During my junior year at high school, someone wrote a bomb threat as a joke on the stall. Suddenly every building entry had a backpack checking station you had to go through. Every bathroom break was scrutinized and logged, and only one person was allowed in the bathroom at a time. Small school (my class had 36 kids or so) but it's a great example of one person ruining everything for everybody.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- miah_ 3y ago
  Its training for the workplace. Better use the restroom quickly, we got product to push so the founders and shareholders can profit. 'Boss makes a dollar, I make a dime, that's why I poop on company time.'
  - 3seashells 3y ago
    [dead]
  - Amorymeltzer 3y ago
    There's a teacher who says exactly that: >"A large part of the school's job is to prepare students for work, we want you to be in class on time because if you show up late all the time to work, they're not going to hire you,"
    - lenerdenator 3y ago
      Well they're doing a shitty job of teaching this, because all of the office jobs I've had don't require me to have my ass in a seat, completely awake and ready to work at 7:35 AM, and when you're a teenager going through hormonal changes, that's a huge ask. My current job has me getting here at 8 AM.
    - bcrosby95 3y ago
      The state funds our schools based upon number of students, absence, and tardies. They have a financial incentive to make sure you're there on time.
- janice1999 3y ago
  >across geography Most Europeans have no idea what a "hall monitor" is and teachers don't have such obsessive control over their students use of toilet facilities. The schools I went to were not perfect and yet all students had to do was raise a hand and ask for permission to leave the classroom.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - ta988 3y ago
    what's a hall monitor?
    - kayodelycaon 3y ago
      A person walking around the school garbage collecting loose students and returning them to their classrooms. Or potentially sending them to the principal’s office if they are repeat offenders. At my high school, we had a city police officer doing this. (Not continuously, but she was always around looking to catch students breaking the law.) Of course this officer was fully armed with a pistol, taser, and pepper spray.
      - TheNewsIsHere 3y ago
        Where I grew up these were called "School Resource Officers" and their presence was inscrutable. Ours coached the girl's volleyball team, had his own small office, and seemingly did nothing else for virtually all four years I was there. He was there to quickly call for police presence when once a large fight broke out, but that was about it.
        BobaFloutist 3y ago
        Their job is to cower in the bathroom in the rare event of a school shooting.
      - hedora 3y ago
- h2odragon 3y ago
  The message that "even your body belongs to the Authority and you must be complicit in disciplining it to our convenience" is very powerful. Gotta get that pounded down into kids when they're too young to effectively resist or question.
- mrguyorama 3y ago
  School administrators are awful because modern American school parents are god awful and want stupid things. Several states are attempting to bring back physical violence as a behavior modification tool because way too many of our fellow citizens genuinely believe that "spare the rod, spoil the child" is a literal, scientific fact. So many people genuinely believe the correct way to handle bad child behavior is to hit them. It's funny, because out of the tens of thousands of students my mom taught over 30 years, the students that misbehaved pretty regularly came from parents that enthusiastically punished their child with violence.Those kids always loved her though, because she was firm and strict but also very maternal. She regularly had kids that everyone else considered "bad students" or "trouble kids" behave, and actually LEARN things (and she taught french class FFS), to the point that those troublesome kids would often beg to come spend their study hall periods in her classroom and actually behave and do their homework. There are a lot of shitty human beings in the American school system, because we pay garbage, so you don't become a teacher unless you have some ulterior motive. For many idealistic young people, they want to teach, but that gets metaphorically beaten out of them by petty administrative politics and dealing with all the shitty people who got the job by default because nobody else wants it and they just want to be a shithead to kids. I shouldn't have to say this but not every physically abused kid will act out, and not every one will act out in the same way. Plenty of those kids were just desperate for someone to pay attention to them. Because we are social animals, and the people that think we should beat our kids are pretty bad at knowing that.
chankstein38 3y ago
I don't understand the concept of "losing bathroom privileges" like... ok? So should I just shit at my desk? It's not a privilege it's a bodily function you can't "take away" someone's ability to go to the bathroom just their ability to do so in a place that is private and purpose built for it.
- wisty 3y ago
  Learning isn't all fun. Everyone thinks they can make learning fun, but it's always a combination of things that are very specific to the person suggesting it ('Actually making everything Thomas the Tank Engine themed is magic and works very well!') or just wistful thinking ('If the teacher didn't tell me to work I would have been more motivated!'). And most of the more valid research suggests more conservative approaches work pretty well. Schools have to make kids do stuff that just isn't fun, without paying them or offering any real incentives (other than grades, which only count in the last year), so they need to make sure kids don't have excuses to shirk.
  - tokai 3y ago
    There is a huge cap between 'learning isn't always fun' to 'breaking the human right to sanitation[0] will aid learning somehow'. [0] https://www.ohchr.org/en/special-procedures/sr-water-and-sanitation/about-human-rights-water-and-sanitation https://www.ohchr.org/en/special-procedures/sr-water-and-san...
    - wisty 3y ago
      So to ensure students can use a bathroom if they really need to, but aren't abusing it to just take a break every class (missing maybe 25% of their class time? Say 15 minutes per hour class) you'd agree to something like an app to track it?
      - educaysean 3y ago
        I'd never agree. What happens if I need more than 15 minutes? Will I be deemed a bad student because I simply need more time to do my business? What does this have to do with how I learn?
mjhay 3y ago
What is the deal with school administrators? I've never interacted with a profession that incompetent and self-important. Some, I assume, are good people. > Fresno High is the latest school in the district to roll out the 5 Star Students app to regulate student trips outside classrooms during instructional periods. Students are limited to two seven-minute bathroom breaks during the day, and the app keeps track of the time they spend outside of classrooms. I'd sure hate to be a student with IBS having to deal with this system. > “Today, you know, it’s girls’ menstrual cycles, I went to the bathroom and I came back two minutes late,” she said. “Some teachers are more strict. For example, my math teacher, if we go past a certain amount of time then we just can’t go for the rest of the month.” Or female. I wonder how much the school district is paying for this app.
- treyd 3y ago
  Yeah if one wealthy family threatens to sue the school district over emotional distress because their kid has an accident that would have easily been avoided if they could have gone to the bathroom for a third time that day this is going to be all over. And that's good thing, this is insane helicoptering.
  - kayodelycaon 3y ago
    There are have been lawsuits and schools have lost. And people have protested to the school board. People have been fired. School board members have been removed. These events show up every once in a while in the media. Yet, these policies are nearly universal. These schools will go right back to doing the same thing after the attention dies down.
- antisthenes 3y ago
  Yeah. Not only that, but it just blows my mind how many people in this thread are defending this gestapo-like behavior of controlling and tracking kids bodily functions. I have a personal anecdote from middle school where we had 4(!!!) minute breaks between classes. A teacher actually refused my entry into class after I was late coming from a PE class on the other side of the school complex. So you had 4 minutes to use the restroom, change, and walk across the entire school. Some teachers/admins just need a good ole smack to their head.
ct0 3y ago
Who is funding this school, amazon? Sounds like a prison.
- kayodelycaon 3y ago
  United States tax payers. We absolutely love building prisons and putting people we don't like in them.
FergusArgyll 3y ago
Do some people like it?!
- code_runner 3y ago
  absolutely my first though. in case it changes, the headline at the time of this comment ends with "Not everyone likes it". It seems like "some people love it" would be the MUCH more interesting (if not disturbing) story.
- pc86 3y ago
  I bet the school administrators (and to a slightly lesser extent the teachers) love it, it gets them to offload a central part of their job. Now instead of disciplining students when they break rules, they can just offload it to an app and abdicate any responsibility. "Oh the app says you can't use the restroom? Guess you can't use the restroom, sorry!" Big "The Lady from Silicon Valley" vibes.
beej71 3y ago
Nothing teaches kids how to be independent like tracking their every move.
ballenf 3y ago
Impressive how well schools are keeping up with preparing kids for the workplace. Amazon and others track bathroom visits, so it's clearly best to train these kids young to expect no privacy as they take breaks from learning how to be the best possible cog.
educaysean 3y ago
This is one of the worst ideas ever. It seems like we love to treat students like they're toddlers until they're 18 then all of a sudden we expect them to act like they're autonomous adults. This isn't how you teach anyone independence.
denton-scratch 3y ago
How does this work if the student declines to carry a mobile device? I own a smartphone so that I can receive SMS authentication codes from people like my bank, who haven't yet grokked that SMS is insecure. But: that phone never leaves my home - I don't carry it around. It isn't a "mobile" phone. So that's going to be "Excuse me Miss, I can't run the app, because I don't bring a smartphone into class. Now can I please have a pee?"
jbullock35 3y ago
This article is a powerful argument for homeschooling.
e12e 3y ago
Previously via daily beast, but flagged - possibly due to not linking to proper source? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39801289 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39801289
- aio2 3y ago
  What is up with my posts being flagged?
h2odragon 3y ago
Pity the kids without phones
- I_Am_Nous 3y ago
  We went from "no phones in the classroom" to "make sure you take your phone with you to the shitter so we can make sure to track you properly" and that's pretty funny. Maybe instead of a hall pass you get "The Shit Phone" and have to sign in with your student ID.

32 points by e12e 3y ago

Why do school administrators have such a strong fascination with restroom visits? Appears across geography, and across time. Someone should get to the root of this.

outside1234 3y ago
I know you are saying this in jest, but there is a huge amount of bullying and drug use that happens in bathrooms at schools.
- bluedino 3y ago
  Or just kids who want to wander the halls, etc
- consp 3y ago
  > bullying As someone who was actually bullied and not heard about it, maybe that's a US thing but to me that never happened in bathrooms and always in the open when teachers were not around.
horns4lyfe 3y ago
I’d be willing to bet the root is a few problem kids that abuse bathroom visits, and schools don’t have a way to just deal with problem kids so they just do something broad. As with most things in schools, you should be more upset with parents that don’t teach their kids not to ruin public goods.
- miah_ 3y ago
  ... I was a problem kid. Believe me, schools have ways to deal with problem kids. It doesn't require installing big brother screens in the toilet. For me the problem was that most schools are all about memorization and thinking inside the box. Switching to a different type of school solved my issues. (smaller classes, more permissive, exploring problems and their solutions with multiple correct answers rather than simply 'memorize this thing, check the box').
  - consp 3y ago
    > smaller classes That's a money issue, not a system issue.
- joezydeco 3y ago
  We just went through a cycle where an entire nation of TikTok users were shown videos of students vandalizing bathrooms. The larger object you could steal, including entire urinals and toilets, the better. Search on "devious licks" and you'll find dozens of school districts that were fighting this problem. At my local HS the answer was to close most of the bathrooms during class time and monitor visits, since putting live cameras in the bathrooms would cause an even larger uproar. Students always had access to a bathroom during class time, just one up near the admin offices that could be more closely observed.
  - I_Am_Nous 3y ago
    During my junior year at high school, someone wrote a bomb threat as a joke on the stall. Suddenly every building entry had a backpack checking station you had to go through. Every bathroom break was scrutinized and logged, and only one person was allowed in the bathroom at a time. Small school (my class had 36 kids or so) but it's a great example of one person ruining everything for everybody.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
miah_ 3y ago
Its training for the workplace. Better use the restroom quickly, we got product to push so the founders and shareholders can profit. 'Boss makes a dollar, I make a dime, that's why I poop on company time.'
- 3seashells 3y ago
  [dead]
- Amorymeltzer 3y ago
  There's a teacher who says exactly that: >"A large part of the school's job is to prepare students for work, we want you to be in class on time because if you show up late all the time to work, they're not going to hire you,"
  - lenerdenator 3y ago
    Well they're doing a shitty job of teaching this, because all of the office jobs I've had don't require me to have my ass in a seat, completely awake and ready to work at 7:35 AM, and when you're a teenager going through hormonal changes, that's a huge ask. My current job has me getting here at 8 AM.
  - bcrosby95 3y ago
    The state funds our schools based upon number of students, absence, and tardies. They have a financial incentive to make sure you're there on time.
janice1999 3y ago
>across geography Most Europeans have no idea what a "hall monitor" is and teachers don't have such obsessive control over their students use of toilet facilities. The schools I went to were not perfect and yet all students had to do was raise a hand and ask for permission to leave the classroom.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- ta988 3y ago
  what's a hall monitor?
  - kayodelycaon 3y ago
    A person walking around the school garbage collecting loose students and returning them to their classrooms. Or potentially sending them to the principal’s office if they are repeat offenders. At my high school, we had a city police officer doing this. (Not continuously, but she was always around looking to catch students breaking the law.) Of course this officer was fully armed with a pistol, taser, and pepper spray.
    - TheNewsIsHere 3y ago
      Where I grew up these were called "School Resource Officers" and their presence was inscrutable. Ours coached the girl's volleyball team, had his own small office, and seemingly did nothing else for virtually all four years I was there. He was there to quickly call for police presence when once a large fight broke out, but that was about it.
      - BobaFloutist 3y ago
        Their job is to cower in the bathroom in the rare event of a school shooting.
    - hedora 3y ago
h2odragon 3y ago
The message that "even your body belongs to the Authority and you must be complicit in disciplining it to our convenience" is very powerful. Gotta get that pounded down into kids when they're too young to effectively resist or question.
mrguyorama 3y ago
School administrators are awful because modern American school parents are god awful and want stupid things. Several states are attempting to bring back physical violence as a behavior modification tool because way too many of our fellow citizens genuinely believe that "spare the rod, spoil the child" is a literal, scientific fact. So many people genuinely believe the correct way to handle bad child behavior is to hit them. It's funny, because out of the tens of thousands of students my mom taught over 30 years, the students that misbehaved pretty regularly came from parents that enthusiastically punished their child with violence.Those kids always loved her though, because she was firm and strict but also very maternal. She regularly had kids that everyone else considered "bad students" or "trouble kids" behave, and actually LEARN things (and she taught french class FFS), to the point that those troublesome kids would often beg to come spend their study hall periods in her classroom and actually behave and do their homework. There are a lot of shitty human beings in the American school system, because we pay garbage, so you don't become a teacher unless you have some ulterior motive. For many idealistic young people, they want to teach, but that gets metaphorically beaten out of them by petty administrative politics and dealing with all the shitty people who got the job by default because nobody else wants it and they just want to be a shithead to kids. I shouldn't have to say this but not every physically abused kid will act out, and not every one will act out in the same way. Plenty of those kids were just desperate for someone to pay attention to them. Because we are social animals, and the people that think we should beat our kids are pretty bad at knowing that.

chankstein38 3y ago

I don't understand the concept of "losing bathroom privileges" like... ok? So should I just shit at my desk? It's not a privilege it's a bodily function you can't "take away" someone's ability to go to the bathroom just their ability to do so in a place that is private and purpose built for it.

wisty 3y ago
Learning isn't all fun. Everyone thinks they can make learning fun, but it's always a combination of things that are very specific to the person suggesting it ('Actually making everything Thomas the Tank Engine themed is magic and works very well!') or just wistful thinking ('If the teacher didn't tell me to work I would have been more motivated!'). And most of the more valid research suggests more conservative approaches work pretty well. Schools have to make kids do stuff that just isn't fun, without paying them or offering any real incentives (other than grades, which only count in the last year), so they need to make sure kids don't have excuses to shirk.
- tokai 3y ago
  There is a huge cap between 'learning isn't always fun' to 'breaking the human right to sanitation[0] will aid learning somehow'. [0] https://www.ohchr.org/en/special-procedures/sr-water-and-sanitation/about-human-rights-water-and-sanitation https://www.ohchr.org/en/special-procedures/sr-water-and-san...
  - wisty 3y ago
    So to ensure students can use a bathroom if they really need to, but aren't abusing it to just take a break every class (missing maybe 25% of their class time? Say 15 minutes per hour class) you'd agree to something like an app to track it?
    - educaysean 3y ago
      I'd never agree. What happens if I need more than 15 minutes? Will I be deemed a bad student because I simply need more time to do my business? What does this have to do with how I learn?

mjhay 3y ago

What is the deal with school administrators? I've never interacted with a profession that incompetent and self-important. Some, I assume, are good people. > Fresno High is the latest school in the district to roll out the 5 Star Students app to regulate student trips outside classrooms during instructional periods. Students are limited to two seven-minute bathroom breaks during the day, and the app keeps track of the time they spend outside of classrooms. I'd sure hate to be a student with IBS having to deal with this system. > “Today, you know, it’s girls’ menstrual cycles, I went to the bathroom and I came back two minutes late,” she said. “Some teachers are more strict. For example, my math teacher, if we go past a certain amount of time then we just can’t go for the rest of the month.” Or female. I wonder how much the school district is paying for this app.

treyd 3y ago
Yeah if one wealthy family threatens to sue the school district over emotional distress because their kid has an accident that would have easily been avoided if they could have gone to the bathroom for a third time that day this is going to be all over. And that's good thing, this is insane helicoptering.
- kayodelycaon 3y ago
  There are have been lawsuits and schools have lost. And people have protested to the school board. People have been fired. School board members have been removed. These events show up every once in a while in the media. Yet, these policies are nearly universal. These schools will go right back to doing the same thing after the attention dies down.
antisthenes 3y ago
Yeah. Not only that, but it just blows my mind how many people in this thread are defending this gestapo-like behavior of controlling and tracking kids bodily functions. I have a personal anecdote from middle school where we had 4(!!!) minute breaks between classes. A teacher actually refused my entry into class after I was late coming from a PE class on the other side of the school complex. So you had 4 minutes to use the restroom, change, and walk across the entire school. Some teachers/admins just need a good ole smack to their head.

ct0 3y ago

Who is funding this school, amazon? Sounds like a prison.

kayodelycaon 3y ago
United States tax payers. We absolutely love building prisons and putting people we don't like in them.

FergusArgyll 3y ago

Do some people like it?!

code_runner 3y ago
absolutely my first though. in case it changes, the headline at the time of this comment ends with "Not everyone likes it". It seems like "some people love it" would be the MUCH more interesting (if not disturbing) story.
pc86 3y ago
I bet the school administrators (and to a slightly lesser extent the teachers) love it, it gets them to offload a central part of their job. Now instead of disciplining students when they break rules, they can just offload it to an app and abdicate any responsibility. "Oh the app says you can't use the restroom? Guess you can't use the restroom, sorry!" Big "The Lady from Silicon Valley" vibes.

beej71 3y ago

Nothing teaches kids how to be independent like tracking their every move.

ballenf 3y ago

Impressive how well schools are keeping up with preparing kids for the workplace. Amazon and others track bathroom visits, so it's clearly best to train these kids young to expect no privacy as they take breaks from learning how to be the best possible cog.

educaysean 3y ago

This is one of the worst ideas ever. It seems like we love to treat students like they're toddlers until they're 18 then all of a sudden we expect them to act like they're autonomous adults. This isn't how you teach anyone independence.

denton-scratch 3y ago

How does this work if the student declines to carry a mobile device? I own a smartphone so that I can receive SMS authentication codes from people like my bank, who haven't yet grokked that SMS is insecure. But: that phone never leaves my home - I don't carry it around. It isn't a "mobile" phone. So that's going to be "Excuse me Miss, I can't run the app, because I don't bring a smartphone into class. Now can I please have a pee?"

jbullock35 3y ago

This article is a powerful argument for homeschooling.

e12e 3y ago

Previously via daily beast, but flagged - possibly due to not linking to proper source? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39801289 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39801289

aio2 3y ago
What is up with my posts being flagged?

h2odragon 3y ago

Pity the kids without phones

I_Am_Nous 3y ago
We went from "no phones in the classroom" to "make sure you take your phone with you to the shitter so we can make sure to track you properly" and that's pretty funny. Maybe instead of a hall pass you get "The Shit Phone" and have to sign in with your student ID.