After months of delays and confusion, McLean High School’s renovated red hallway bathrooms opened on Jan. 17 in a ceremonial ribbon-cutting. The opening came after a school division debacle with contractors that inhibited the anticipated opening in fall 2023.

The administration has now closed the silver hallway bathrooms in advance of upcoming renovations to those bathrooms.

“Four bathrooms were supposed to be done by the end of the summer. We wanted the popular, most used bathrooms [at McLean] to be done before the school year started,” Principal Ellen Reilly said. “Four were supposed to be done, but then they didn’t even start working on them [when planned].”

Bathroom renovation plans were publicized for many months last school year before work started. Criticism had been mounting over the lack of boys’ bathroom urinal dividers from years back, resulting in the introduction of dividers that many saw as small and ineffective. Although the bathroom was closed for long, students had begun to question the lack of progress.

“[During that week] before school let out, nobody had started. By June, nobody had started. It took until the fourth of July weekend for workers to come in to start working,” Reilly said.

The issues with bathrooms were only compounded by the rise of TikTok challenges encouraging students to do anything from removing stall doors to disabling, depleting, and confiscating soap dispensers.

“The [new] stall doors are durable, they seem to be heavy and can’t be broken or [easily] removed,” senior Daniel Dille said. “I don’t appreciate that it took halfway through the school year to complete [these renovations].”

While durable, many students have expressed concerns that students looking to cause damage may soon revert the bathrooms to their previous conditions.

“Honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised if the bathrooms start looking worse in a few weeks,” junior Lawrence Liu said. “It wouldn’t be much of a surprise to see lunch trash on the floor. I remember one time in sophomore year I saw someone purposely throw banana peels into an open part of a bathroom’s ceiling.”

In the blue hallway, where most English and History classes are located, one of the bathrooms infamously faced a caved-in ceiling last year, which eventually collapsed onto a stall, rendering it inoperable.

Severe delays were in part a result of the contractor splitting its time between Walt Whitman Middle School and McLean High School. Both schools required immediate repairs.

Some bathrooms contain more sinks than before—three instead of two—and the renewed boys’ bathrooms have more urinals than in the past.

“I’m glad the school is fixing [the bathrooms], but I do wish that they did it over the summer,” Dille said.

Staff and students alike hope that the first section of bathroom renovations will mean broader progress for school facility improvements, one step at a time.

“Every one of the [student bathrooms] will get done, and we will shut each one down periodically,” Reilly said.