If you have recently tried to go to the bathroom but found it locked, you’re not alone.

Desert Pines administration says that the bathrooms are often closed in order to protect students, but many students have expressed frustration about the closures.

“I think they should open back the bathrooms because we should be able to use the bathrooms whenever we feel like it,” said 12th grader Lesly Sanchez.

Assistant Principal Mrs. Wright said that they have been finding inappropriate things in the bathrooms, which is why they are closed.

“It’s to keep our students safe and to make sure that our students aren’t doing anything inappropriate in the bathrooms when they’re not supposed to,” Wright said.

The Desert Pines hall monitors say their job isn’t to monitor the bathrooms; their job is to stop any disturbances.

One of the hall monitors, Mr. Oscar, said his job was to “make sure to keep the campus safe.”

“Safety is one of our main concerns about the campus,” Oscar continued.

From a teacher’s perspective, many of them do seem to think it is a problem when students are gone from class for so long.

“I think that we’ve had some students that have kind of abused the bathroom policy,” DP science teacher Dr. Hermansen said. “We are only allowed one student at a time [to go to the bathroom] and we have students that are outside taking 20-30 minutes to use the restroom.”

But many students say that they are gone for long periods of time because they are in search of an open bathroom.