By Ben Shapiro, Editor-in-Chief

TESD Maintenance Director Colm Kelly fished eight vape pens out of Conestoga’s sewage pipes on Nov. 7. Since then, three of the six first-floor, single-stall, gender-neutral bathrooms outside of Room 124 have remained closed due to multiple vape pens and some feminine products clogging their pipes.

Kelly said that at the start of the school year, he found that students were putting an increasing number of vape pens in the bathrooms’ ceiling tiles. To discourage this behavior, he secured the ceiling tiles in place, which he believes led to students discarding their vape pens by flushing them down the toilets. 

“People gotta understand that they hurt everybody when they put things down the sewer line that they shouldn’t,” Kelly said. “It takes a lot of time (to fix), and we have a couple of bathrooms shut down as a result. It’s a shame, really.”

Kelly said that due to the intensity of the restoration project and the disruption it will create, the district will most likely not be able to fix the bathrooms during the school year. He estimated that the process to repair the pipes will take around three weeks to complete.

“We’re going to have to cut the concrete floor open, cut the pipe and remove whatever is down there,” Kelly said. “It’s a bigger project than most realize and it can’t be done in a week.”

Assistant principal Dr. Patrick Boyle, who oversees the school’s facilities, has found that the privacy that bathrooms provide students has historically led to students abusing the spaces. The 2021 addition of the vast majority of the school’s gender-neutral, single-stall bathrooms emphasized this trend.

“What I’ve seen is that it’s still the same level of activities happening, but there’s far more places to do it,” Boyle said.

He said that he has witnessed and dealt with students flushing objects down toilets before, but never to the extent that required him to close off a block of bathrooms.

“I wish there was a way that kids could really think more clearly,” Boyle said. “But they’re teenagers: they make mistakes. Our job is to help them not make the same mistake again and understand the fault in their ways so they can make better decisions for themselves.”

Ben Shapiro can be reached at [email protected].