There are many new policies this year at Windsor High School. One of them is the new controversial ten minute bathroom rule. 

The new bathroom policy doesn’t allow students to use the bathrooms during the first ten and last ten minutes of class. 

Since each class period is 47 minutes long, that gives the students a 27 minute time window to use the restrooms. Some students have mixed feelings about this new rule. 

“I believe the new bathroom policy is just unnecessary overall,” junior Logan Mitchell said. 

Others are more accepting of the rule. 

Junior Gage Dumas said, “I really don’t mind it. I personally don’t use the restroom a whole lot during class, so it really doesn’t affect all that much.”

Some think this rule is tough to enforce.

“I don’t think we should be limited to when we can use the restroom. Like I understand why they made the rule, but I just feel like it’s kind of limiting our rights,” junior David Duke said. 

Principal Jason Naucke hopes the new rule will help with students learning in the classroom. 

“The idea was we want to try and protect those 47 minutes as much as we can and try to use a majority of that time for learning,” Naucke said. 

Another point Naucke made was, without this rule in the past, miscommunication between students and teachers sometimes happened. Students would be wrongly marked absent and students would be in the restrooms at the very beginning and end of class without notifying teachers. 

“The other part was you would have students come in to class and try and tell the teachers they were going to the bathroom and the teachers would be distracted doing two or three other things and the students would leave class thinking they had permission and then that caused the students to get marked absent,” Naucke said. 

Students may have mixed feelings about this policy but Naucke would like to assure the students that this bathroom rule was implemented from an academic standpoint and to avoid further complications.

Naucke said, “It’s not that we’re not allowing them to go. It’s like let’s wait 10 minutes so we can avoid having all these complications and all this kind of confusion. Were looking at it from a learning standpoint. You know, let’s get everyone to class get everything set, and get everyone on the same page and then we can go on from there.”