In December, an article I wrote about the school bathrooms got a lot of attention among local students, parents, and teachers. I bemoaned the poor upkeep, the graffiti, the locked doors, and the way students treat the facilities.

To their credit, the school administration has done things to address those mounting issues since then. I recently interviewed Albany High’s principal, Jodi Commerford, to follow up on the previous piece and get her perspective on the situation.

“We just did a lot of work,” Commerford told me, citing restructuring to the building operations committee and brainstorming in the district’s health and safety team. “In there we have a standing agenda item for maintenance, our security, and the rebuild… we’re just trying to problem solve how we can make sure there are schedules and plans in place for maintenance.”

Commerford says she and Mr. Gilmore (the new vice principal) went around to every bathroom in the school and “made a list of any issues”, following up on “probably about 85% of those now.” The two bathrooms downstairs have been repainted, dispensers and door locks have been checked, and the maintenance staff is painting over graffiti on a weekly basis.

In my original article, I stressed the importance of reaching out to students about responsible lavatory conduct, and Mrs. Commerford held assemblies the very day before our meeting to talk about proper behavior in all parts of the school. She shied away from discussing specific restroom details with the students, telling me “that’s not a conversation I would have with a whole group of students… bathrooms are kind of a personal conversation.”

A major point I made before was that the removal of all bathroom doors could decrease bottlenecks and bad behavior in the bathrooms. Commerford claims that my suggestion is fundamentally at ends with school safety policy. “It’s more safety for us than privacy,” she explained. “In the event of a lockdown or any emergency situation no one has to take the time out to lock the door; you just shut the door and it’s automatically locked.

“In a lockdown, we just shut the doors, so if you’re in there, you’re in there. So if every door in this building is not locked, in the event of an emergency situation, then that person has to get to an area that’s secure, and that’s time wasted.” Moreover, locked doors “allow us to control the number of students at a time in the bathroom with the doors being locked.”

The safety argument makes sense and everything comes down whether we are willing to sacrifice a little annoyance for each student in exchange for a slightly better lockdown system in the one-in-a-million event of a true emergency. The administration clearly is. Perhaps there are no perfect solutions to the door issue, and they’re going with the most cautious one.

Nearly all the points in my original article have been addressed to a decent extent. It’s nice seeing the new blue shade of paint in the bathrooms instead of the previous cacography that covered the walls, and it’s admirable that the school is putting more effort into the everyday maintenance of the facilities. There’s still progress to be made, but we’re on the right track.