New Hampshire Students Walkout After District Banned Urinals as a Compromise to Its Gender Identity Bathroom Policy
“the culmination of a long debate about district rules about bathroom use and gender identity”
The school board in Milford, New Hampshire, considered a proposal banning students from using bathrooms based on their gender identity.
To compromise, the school banned urinals, limiting bathrooms to toilet stalls. Students on both sides of the argument staged a walkout in protest.
The Associated Press reports:
New Hampshire students protest urinal ban in gender debate
Dozens of students walked out of their New Hampshire school after the district banned urinals in a compromise to a proposal that would have blocked children from using facilities based on their gender identity.
The school board decided a few days before the Friday walkout to prohibit students at Milford Middle School and Milford High School from using urinals or shared spaces in locker rooms.
The ban in a town of about 15,000 people roughly 35 miles (56 kilometers) from Concord, New Hampshire’s capital, was the culmination of a long debate about district rules about bathroom use and gender identity. District procedures say students can access the bathroom that “corresponds to their gender identity consistently asserted at school.”
That procedure still applies. But a proposal that came before the school board called for no longer allowing students to use school bathrooms and locker rooms based on their gender identity. Board member Noah Boudreault said he proposed new restrictions on bathroom use as part of a compromise.
“I want to be clear, it was a compromise to both sides of this issue,” Boudreault said. “It was out into effect last week.”
Under the new policy, the maximum occupancy for each bathroom and locker room will be capped at the number of stalls it contains. It also prevents students from using shared changing areas.
Here’s a video report from WMUR News:
Here’s more from the Daily Mail:
Superintendent Christi Michaud told the news outlet many students – especially the male students at the high school – expressed their concerns and posed questions regarding the newly imposed bathroom restrictions to members of her team.
‘They feel as though there wasn’t an issue or a concern here at the high school,’ she said.
She said the tighter rules could lead to bathroom bottlenecks and detract from time in the classroom, but said the school personnel are working to comply with the board’s directive.
Sixteen-year-old transgender student Nico Romeri spoke at a school board meeting on February 6 urging it to reject the ban.
He expressed his concerns that the policies could have a negative impact on the mental health of the district’s LGBTQ students.
He said he and other queer students just want to be treated the same as cisgender high school students.
‘I want my high school experience to be just like everyone else’s just like getting my license, taking biology class, and figuring my life out, not fighting for it,’ the sophomore student said.
When you imagined the future years ago, is this what you pictured? Arguments about bathrooms?
Featured image via YouTube.
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Meanwhile nobody can read or do math at grade level and students are permanently glued to social media and videos of people watching videos.
“Sixteen-year-old transgender student” Nico Romeri’s parents are complete failures obviously and should tell their kid to grow the hell up or at least stop indulging the kid’s attention-whoring behavior.
Guy, read the article.
This particular TG student OPPOSED the ban on urinals.
S(he) possibly/probably recognized that the policy was knee-jerk stupid, discriminated against boys who can write their initials in the snow standing up, and given both of those things not engender warm fuzzies towards TGs from the kids discriminated against.
TGs who recognize not every accommodation make sense or is fair should be encouraged and not railed at.
I’ve read the article three times. I can now officially announce that I am so antediluvian that I can no longer even ascertain which of these things are demands, which are compromises, which are insults, why any of them have been assigned to those categories, and what any aspect of this symbolizes to which participants. All I know is that at the end of the day, it looks like the guys are getting the short end of the stick, but for all I know, the “new” guys wanted this, for some reason.
You’ve misunderstood. The new policy is a reasonable compromise that preserves everyone’s privacy. No more open facilities where people of the same sex are exposed to each other naked. Since some people of the same sex are in fact not of the same sex, if we make everything private it doesn’t matter.
This girl who pretends to be a boy is against the policy because she wants to keep the urinals so that the boys are forced to use them in front of her. And so that she can pull down her pants in front of the boys and try to use them.
Shutting down the urinals is tacit admission that the trans “boys” can’t use them. Last time I looked, the men’s rooms had stalls, so why don’t they just use those and not have to make some kind of pronouncement?
Does this now mean we are going to have long lines for the men’s rooms too?
Thanks, Guy, but I did read the article several times, Guy. My issue is with indulging this kid’s delusion or play-acting at being the opposite sex, period, The entire “TG” (I didn’t know it gets a cool capitalized abbreviated brand like “AOC”, now) fad is the new version of getting piercings, tattoos, and turning up Slayer albums to 11 to drive your parents crazy.
But, hey Guy, thanks for trying to “educate” me, Guy.
Ah, the male sex, the masculine “natgender”. Have penis, will save time and sanitation at the urinal. No insult intended, since it is, after all, Her choice.
… Thank Gaia for this.
Anywhooo, equal in rights, and complementary in Nature/nature.
What trash. HS students don’t walk out of class. If they do, they have suspended their attendance and should be sent home and the teacher fired. Then go to the kid’s homes and offer to spank the parents if they can’t send a kid to class no better disciplined and taught than this.
I walked out of classes twice in my lifetime.
I attended one of four gender specific high schools in the City that had only males or females. The school was well known and one of the top ten in the country.
The School Board decided to end the school’s provision to be only male. They left the other 3 single gender schools alone.
We walked.
Two thousand students and teachers ascending on a School Board meeting makes a powerful impression.
The School Board then decided to revoke the teaching credentials of the teachers in our school who had come from industries such as engineering, drafting, foundry, etc. They deemed the teachers needed a teaching degree rather than a teaching certificate.
We walked then too.
The school now sits a shell of its former academic, social and ethical greatness.
My parents supported my decision to walk out. And if you want to talk badly about my parents, their involvement in schools, neighborhood organizations and church again, I will gladly come to your home and or place of work and discuss your obvious lack of parenting skills, intelligence and integrity.
While not applicable in this forum, the First Amendment does codify the right to say what you want (in most cases.) It also codifies your right to be wrong.
Glad you think so. I walked out of class(es) at the bell. Nobody did otherwise. My kids and gkids turned out fine and none ever walked out. No teacher would ever have allowed such a thing in my day. If any dared, they would have been dealt with as I indicated. I will admit a firm letter would have gone to the parents, it would have felt like a spanking by the time the parent(s) read “Yours Truly” Principle ——.
“Two thousand students and teachers ascending on a School Board meeting makes a powerful impression.” Now That is the way.
Maybe nothing came up during your education that required or at least initiated a walkout / protest. I can’t say whether that happened or not. I cannot say whether there were any issues that you felt passionately about that affected your school life. If there were, and you were more concerned with how teachers reacted or whether a principal sent a letter home to your parents, that says a great deal. Furthermore, I am not sure how you want teachers to prevent students from protesting. Lock students in classrooms? Stand there with a weapon to drive students back to the classroom? What happens when the teachers are walking out in support as well? You want the police to arrest 2000 students for the protected right to protest?
My parents taught me that there are times when you have to go to the mat and fight injustices.
Somehow the argument that “we never did that back in the day” is less than persuasive to me.
Apparently you think that the right to seek redress and to communicate with the government can only be held outside of school hours. That begs the question, “how do students and teachers appear before boards on issues of concern when School Boards meet during school hours?”
I would also be interested in how involved you, your kids and your grandkids are involved with local, state or national political issues. For example, how many local City Council / Commission meetings have you attended? How many times have you spoken in those meetings?
Going along just to get along is no way to go through life.
“Back in my day” means when I entered first grade in 1952. I finished HS in 1964. There were no walk outs. Teachers would not have allowed, Principals would not have and parents would not have. Our school boards met in the early evenings and still do where I live.
If a student walks out of a classroom it’s an automatic “0” for the day. If a teacher walks out of a class it’s the same as anyone else walking out of the work place – unexcused absences jeopardize the employee’s future with the employer.
The rest of us were under these requirements. The students and teachers can be, too. If you lack discipline, expect to pay the price.
.
The fact that you did not participate in walk out does not mean there were none. During your education. there were walkouts over segregation, civil rights, etc. If you choose not to fight injustices and stay at home doing nothing, that is on you.
There are others who see injustices and try to change things. There are those whose School Boards do meet in the middle of the day. As I said, when we walked out back in my day, we walked to the School Board meeting(s).
General and absolute statements such as no one “would have allowed that” have no basis in reality. There were people that allowed walk outs. Our teachers and principal – who was a decorated, World War II veteran – allowed students to try to change the world for the better.
As I said, going along to get along is no way to go through life.
By the way, you didn’t directly answer how many times you have appeared in front of your City Council / Commission or any other governing body. I will take that to mean that you never have.
I’ll go to my grave knowing that I fought the good fight over a variety of issues.
You can say that you stayed in place, doing nothing.
“I cannot say whether there were any issues that you felt passionately about that affected your school life.”
We would have demonstrated to have the girls admitted. Nothing more ridiculous than a single-sex school holding regular dances “for the kids.” Kids don’t have rich social lives outside of school.
Eventually, economics achieved what youthful hormones could not.
Off topic, but your name has me asking, Are you a luthier?
Government schools should be abolished.
Put urinals in women’s bathroom….total equity.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08HV7JH69
That’s exactly what the transgender lobby wants. Because some girls have penises and should be allowed to whip them out in front of the girls who don’t.
This school board is doing the best it can, within the boundaries it has been set, to preserve everyone’s privacy.
A board is so-called because it bores people with its pronouncements, posturing, and poppycock, A board separate from the people it bores serves its other constituencies first.
Of course these folks passed a policy elaborate, impractical, and ineffective in practice, without input from the people who’d have to live with it, The declaration served the people it was crafted to serve.
Do away with bathrooms altogether and have everybody go to the bathroom before they come to school, or elsewise they can go outside outside in the bushes.
Maybe they should also eat breakfast before getting there. What an idea!
Especially “the poor” who get free food through WIC and EBT.
Kind of like Seattle or SF.
Seattle is the largest, whitest collective virtue signal I’ve even seen.
Kowtowing to the .1% of the poplation that need psychiatric help to deal with gender dysphoria doesn’t seem like the best course of action.
Blocking urinals?
Say it ain’t so!
But wait, the new Ford class fleet carriers HAVE NO URINALS ANYWHERE.
The official reasons are, get this, urinals had a habit of blocking [but not toilets, obviously because more water is flushed each time] and it will be “easier” to switch heads from male to female and vice versa.
Thank you, Democrat voters!
My father told me that his WW2 troop ship had gutter latrines, for all purposes, and one quickly learned not to sit at either the fore or aft end of the gutter, because when the ship pitched…
The old Comiskey Park in Chicago also had gutter urinals in the men’s bathrooms. About 12 feet long each or so, as I recall, as you’d unzip and do your business with 20 to 50 other men at the same time, right out in the open. Tell that to a progressive woman who’s campaigning to remove urinals and she’ll have the vapors…
Gonna be a lot of wet toilet seats that nobody will want to sit on
Great. A whole new class of people that I have to ignore when they complain about the seat being left up.
Maybe if the student would pay attention to biology and anatomy classes, they might have a clue. Many of them already have mental health issues. Quit pushing this crap onto children.
Put the urinals back where they were, best anatomy lesson to these kindergartens
I would be careful using the men’s room sinks if they follow through…
Women (real) used them too…..
The obvious solution to end the tyranny of western colonial patriarchy bathrooms is to mandate diapers or pee on the floor.
Abolish g0vernment schools
End Public Marxist Seminaries Now
Huh, if i walked out of high school in protest I would have had an unexcused absence and been suspended. On the other hand, as a male if i walked into the female locker room and pulled off my clothes to display my Swinging Richard to all and sundry I’d have been arrested.
What the hell is wrong with these people? Just suspend all the the kids who are protesting and that would be that.
The schools I went to never had the foresight to provide a student smoking lounge. That left the bathrooms. Not that I could attest to this personally but I think the smoke would have been thick enough to hide the existence of urinals. If you cherished your lungs you learned to hold it till you got to the beach after leaving campus midday.