New York's Piss-Covered Children Just Want Better Bathrooms at School
The P.S. 132 building in Washington Heights might have the filthiest bathrooms in New York City.
The 100-year-old schoolhouse's cracking walls scoff in the face of CBGB's; its pestilent toilet seats flash oviform grins at the mere mention of 285 Kent. DNAinfo, in a report about parents' efforts to renovate facilities at the building—which houses both Dos Puentes and Juan Pablo Duarte elementary schools—shares stomach-turning detail after stomach-turning detail:
Concerned parents at the building, which contains the Dos Puentes and Juan Pablo Duarte schools, also described the bathrooms as having low-hanging, exposed pipes that students climb on when unsupervised, as well as stall doors that frequently get stuck, forcing children to crawl on the dirty floor to exit them.
"Kids were coming home with urine on their shirts," said Megan Cossey, whose son attends Dos Puentes, which recently hosted the Queen of Spain and Schools Chancellor Carmen Fariña. "The bathrooms have literally never been renovated. The building is over 100 years old, and it looks it."
Kids, in case you missed it, are coming home with urine-covered shirts. Because they have to crawl on the urine-covered floor to escape the bathroom's stalls.
It would be one thing if these odorous poop dungeons were quarantined, isolated in some remote corner of the school, to be visited only in the event of a bowel emergency, but no. They are next to the cafeteria. And the walls don't go all the way to the floor:
Additionally, they said the pipes in the bathroom frequently get backed up and leak onto the floor — a situation that is especially concerning in the girls bathroom, which is separated from the cafeteria by a partition that ends inches from the floor.
"You can imagine the stench," Crisostomo said. "And it's right next to the kitchen where the food is being warmed."
Parents say they've fought for years to have the restrooms renovated to no avail, but a recent development brings hope. The city's School Construction Authority set aside $2.5 million—million!—for a full bathroom makeover at the building, and a Department of Education spokesman told DNAinfo the project will be completed by December 2015.
