And I don’t mean financially. It’s almost an open secret at Lincoln that if you go into any bathroom, for any gender, on any floor, there’s a seemingly 50/50 chance that it’s entirely missing a soap dispenser, stall door, or is lacking some other necessary resource for a restroom to function. Lincoln has over 1700 students, and it isn’t that big a building; it’s only to be expected that a school of this size with so many students will experience some wear and tear over the years.
However, the sheer scale of the damage is truly unreasonable. I recently spoke to a man performing maintenance on the southern entrance doors, and he told me that while his job was only to work on external maintenance, he was aware that there were numerous internal maintenance tickets that were still being processed, some of which were months old.
For example, I reported a stall door with no lock in the southern first floor boy’s restroom in November, which the repairman actually had heard about. It seems like there’s a collection of reports just piled up, sitting in limbo on somebody’s desk. What issues are these unaddressed reports raising, and just how broken is Lincoln?
I decided to investigate, starting with the Boy’s Restrooms and found that at least half of them have some sort of defunct utility. Here’s what I found:
-The first floor Boys bathroom again has no lock on the stall door
-The Boys side of the split bathroom in the first floor commons has an out of order urinal and has been missing a soap dispenser for months
-The northern first floor Boys bathroom next to the math classes is missing a cap for the faucet push-button.
I also interviewed several students who utilize the Girls restrooms to ask what issues they have, and how said issues affect them. Mireya Dubin (’25) reported that the basement Girls bathroom is missing a knob for the sink. When asked how she felt about the bathroom facilities always being broken, Dubin said she was, “Annoyed. I’m just trying to wash my f**king hands, because this school is disgusting… I need to stay healthy.”
Franny Dudley (’25) described a faucet in the second floor Girls Bathroom near the library that will sometimes spray water at the user. “This makes me feel even worse after my challenging third period environment. It’s stressful enough, and getting sprayed in the face right after? This sh*t pisses me off” she vented.
Lucy Waddell (’25) told me about two broken sink knobs in the 3rd floor girl’s bathroom
Beyond broken bathrooms, Lincoln’s educational materials are falling apart as well, and I don’t mean the curriculum. Mr. Lowe informed me that the Fab Lab has several broken pieces of equipment. Off the top of his head he pointed out:
-A vinyl cutter that hasn’t worked since August
-A burnt out ceiling light
-Desktop computers that he doesn’t have cords for or are otherwise defunct
-A broken door hinge
Mr. Lowe explained how the constant whack-a-mole game of getting broken equipment fixed takes a toll on his teaching, “It’s exhausting, what’s hard as a teacher is right now I have a class of kids, kids who need help. And now all of a sudden outside of my work day I have to write work orders and tech tickets. It’s tough to find the time to go down to the custodian.”
It is, however, disingenuous to simply blame this issue on maintenance staff or administration. Sometimes fab-lab equipment and technology will break simply from use, or poor software. The lower commons garage door has a track record of breaking down at the start of every school year, teachers even made bets in September on how long it would take this year.
While we can acknowledge that equipment will naturally break, we can also acknowledge that regardless of how much we expect students to be destructive, there is absolutely no good reason for a stall lock to be fully removed from the door, no reason to rip a soap dispenser off the wall, and no reason for sink caps to be missing.
Ultimately, multiple facilities that seem necessary and proper in order for students to have a successful education are simply not operable. From bathrooms falling apart, to essential classroom equipment left unusable, it’s a constant nuisance for both teachers and students.
I believe most everyone would agree that students should not be going out of their way to vandalize the bathrooms. I also think everyone can agree that it would be nice to see a maintenance ticket fulfilled in less than 4 months. However even if the maintenance tickets take another year to be filled, we as students can assure that regardless of how badly our building breaks, the links that bind our community never will.
