You are a school district superintendent.

You are charged with the education and safety of 41,422 students.

You are aware that there has been a 316 percent increase during the last four years of student “behavior events” in school restrooms in your school district.

Behavior events run the gamut from bullying, vandalism, and vaping to physical attacks.

There were 340 such restroom incidents in the 2018-19 school year.

The number in 2022-23 reached 1,416.

You are also charged with designing and building a new middle school.

You make looking at possible ways to enhance student safety in restrooms — as well as hallways and classrooms — a key component of the new school’s design.

Those tasked with developing building plans come up with what is at least a novel idea, if not revolutionary, when it comes to public school TK-12 restroom design as  we now know it in the United States.

The design?

Restrooms are not closed off.

There are no entry doors

And it is not all walled off.

A bank of communal sinks faces the hallway where a pony wall stops just above the backsplash.

Then there are private stalls with floor-to-ceiling doors clustered in groups or pods.

Some restrooms are open on both ends, meaning you could walk completely through it with the bank of private stalls on one side and the communal sink on the other.

Others have one way in and out while retaining the pony wall design that separates the communal sinks from the hallway.

There are no visual obstructions preventing staff from seeing what goes on in the “open area” of the restroom.

The middle school, being built in Lexington, Kentucky, opting for the “pod” — the clustering of private stalls as a restroom — will have signage designating whether the pod is for boys or girls.

The design means students smoking in the bathroom, vandalizing it during a TikTok challenge, bullying someone, or fighting will be seen by staff from the hallways.

The cost clearly is higher to construct such restrooms that some laud as creating “potty parity”  given they are sans urinals meaning there is no express option, so to speak, for boys that only have to do he No. 1.

If this were 1975 and someone branded as a conservative objected to the design, they’d probably zero in on the extra costs.

That’s probably because the design from the 1970s standards is such a stark deviation.

But this is 2024, where there is an ulterior motive supposedly lurking behind everything that is done.

Matt Lockett is a representative in the Kentucky Legislature.

He believes the design for restrooms at the Mary E. Britton Middle School targeted to open in 2025 is an attempt to circumvent the so-called “anti-transgender law” adopted last year.

Lockett labeled the restroom design as a “gender-neutral open concept.”

Instead, he is hawking his own legislation that would require Kentucky schools with a hundred or more students to have at least 90 percent of a school’s restrooms designated for one gender — assumingly proportional between male and female — and 10 percent to be all access restrooms.

 What is the difference?

Or more precisely, what is the beef with the Britton Middle School restroom design?

In Lockett’s own words, “ we expect our school to be safe, learning environments, and not social experiments.”

Bad news.

Schools — including restrooms — have been social experiments for decades especially when it comes to pre-teen and teen behavior centered around the “natural selection process” when it comes to bullying, cliques, and other deviant behavior such as vandalizing public property.

Instead of having a cow over a perceived “social experiment” when it comes to the restrooms design that you believe to circumvent the letter of the law, one needs to take a deep breath.

The design certainly more than meets the spirit and intent of the Kentucky law.

The intent is not to subject individual students to being uncomfortable or feel threatened whether they are biologically male or female or transgender et al.

One completely closed off stall, one person.  

Everyone in the modern take on a water closet — a closed room with a toilet in a bigger bathroom that some homes have — would be of the same ilk.

The huffing and puffing posturing on both sides over “transgenders” — who are not a modern invention — is creating smoke that is effectively blinding everyone to the real safety threat and level of comfort that the unconventional restroom design addresses.

Let there be no doubt. No kid using a school restroom should be made uncomfortable.

And even one instance of a sexual attack committed by someone — whether they are the few that use transgender laws to do so to prey or leer on the opposite gender, are of the same sex, or a hazing/bullying victim by “straight” students whose actions veer into sexual assault — is intolerable.

The design, being slammed as a “social experiment”, works to prevent all forms of sexual assault in school restrooms and not just young opportunistic perverts proclaiming they are transgender when they’re not.

But equally important, it is a design that promises to drastically reduce vaping, vandalism, bullying and fighting in school restrooms.

It creates a safer school environment.

At first glance, based on American public restroom norms, the design may make one a tad uncomfortable.

But if you shed the talking — or is that yelling — points of the far right and the far left in the cultural wars, the restroom design addresses more universal issues that have undermined school safety for decades.

This column is the opinion of editor, Dennis Wyatt, and does not necessarily represent the opinions of The Bulletin or 209 Multimedia. He can be reached at dwyatt@mantecabulletin.com