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.
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.
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.
He was there to quickly call for police presence when once a large fight broke out, but that was about it.
They didn’t give the kid proper training, but not a gun, taser or pepper spray.
Seems reckless in hindsight. /s
And SROs absolutely do escalate to the criminal justice system (e.g. juvenile detention) when necessary. There are occasionally guns, knives, drugs, and violence in schools, and those are situations where the legal system is frequently involved.
The bottom line is that a student hall monitor is going to be able to snitch on an otherwise good kid who is goofing off in the hall, but they're not going to be able to deal with more serious issues. And it would be a very bad idea to rely on them as the front-line workers for more serious issues.
At university level nobody is checking attendance anyways. You go to classes/lectures if you think you need them. There's no points awarded for the mere fact that you showed up or for anything occurring in the course of them. Here controlling bathroom breaks would be beyond farcical.
Or maybe not having pee on their floor is a privilege the school enjoys, one that could be taken away by a student at any time.
The point is that if push comes to shove, the students are going to win this one every time, so it cannot really be a privilege, can it?
Using the restroom isn't a privilege, but being able to wander the halls unsupervised is.
If it's in good faith, yes, certainly. Every privilege is abused sometimes. I fully expect to break the speed limit on the way to work today, because my car doesn't have a governor installed. Turn me in, I beg you.
To address what I perceive as the issue you raise, so what? If someone needs to hit the head (nausea, diarrhea, something) they need to go. If an act of elimination takes longer than what some uptight school administrator decides is necessary, so what? We as a society tolerate some small abuse so that everything else functions well.
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.
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.
'Boss makes a dollar, I make a dime, that's why I poop on company time.'
>"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,"
My current job has me getting here at 8 AM.
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.
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').
That's a money issue, not a system issue.