At the beginning of my time at Ferris, my biggest concern was finding my classes. Now, it’s finding a working bathroom stall.
As a psychology major, most of my classes are in Starr, meaning I spend most of my time on campus there. I have a major problem with it.
Now that summer is approaching, it is the perfect time to say this: the women’s bathroom stall doors on the second floor at Starr do not work. I mean, sometimes they do. And sometimes you end up stuck in the bathroom stall and awkwardly have to hit the door to get it to open.
I remember for about a week of this semester, there were only two “working” doors in the second-floor bathroom. Or so we thought. Nobody could open the door until a faculty member told us we just “needed to kick it in.” That doesn’t instill confidence in the quality of our doors, but at least the door was opening, and there were three usable stalls again.
According to the U.S. Access Board’s “Guide to the ADA Accessibility Standards,” the ADA requires that door latches or other hardware “must… be usable with one hand and not require tight grasping, pinching, twisting of the wrist, or more than five pounds of force.” I do not think our bathrooms fit that standard anymore.
We do not have a handicap-accessible stall.
The sliding locks on the doors in Starr bathrooms close sometimes. In certain stalls, it requires significant effort to ensure the lock is closed and even more effort to open it back up.
Sometimes, you have to lift the door a bit to get the lock to slide into place, which is honestly too much work to get a bathroom door to close.
I know some people just put their backpacks in the stall with them to block the door because it is so difficult to lock the door and hope that people pay attention to the feet under the stalls before they try to open a door.
It is extremely uncomfortable to go to the bathroom in a stall that someone might open because the lock does not work. It is uncomfortable to be seemingly stuck in the stall and have to force the door back open, and it is uncomfortable to feel unsafe.
Obviously, as someone who uses the women’s bathrooms, I am unable to speak on the status of the men’s bathroom stalls at Starr. I have not heard great things about the doors in those bathrooms either, but I lack the personal experience.
The entire point of a door is that it opens and closes, and when our bathroom stall doors here can barely do either one of those, it is likely time for change.
The last thing I need on a bad day is to get stuck in a bathroom stall.
As someone with a connective tissue disorder, it’s incredibly frustrating to subluxate, or occasionally fully dislocate, my shoulders trying to open a bathroom door. It’s mildly painful and entirely unnecessary and avoidable.
Our campus isn’t always the most accessible, to begin with, and the bathrooms shouldn’t be another barrier.