After waiting for what seems like forever to get into a stall in the girls’ bathroom, the last thing that I want to see is graffiti on the walls. To me, graffiti makes our school to seem dirty.

The graffiti includes conversations such as, “I love him,” “No you don’t,” “Live Life,” etc. The positive saying on the doors are nice, making girls feel better about their lives. I liked it when the Girl Effect club wrote positive things on sticky notes. Sticky notes were not permanent and were able to make many girls smile when they read the encouraging messages.

Unlike the sticky notes, the worst stalls in the school are what the girls refer to as the “Jesus” stalls. It started out as one stall last year, after a girl wrote a Bible verse in the first hallway bathroom on the second floor. That one verse started a chain reaction of girls arguing whether Jesus is real. This trend has since spread to three stalls around the school, with very little space left for more graffiti. I try to avoid these stalls as much as possible because the graffiti makes me uncomfortable.

What I don’t understand is why girls would want to sit in the bathroom to draw on the doors. Don’t they not have better things to accomplish instead of creating messes for someone else to clean up? In elementary school we were taught not to draw or destroy someone else’s property because it was not ours. If we learned this when we were small children, why is there graffiti produced by high school students?

You would not want someone to come and draw on your property, would you? We were told to treat others as we would want to be treated. We do not see the administration drawing on our property, so why do girls destroy the bathroom? I feel bad for the custodians who have to scrub the graffiti off, just to come back to work the next day to find more graffiti on their freshly cleaned stalls.

If you are attempting to find yourself by writing on the bathroom stall, stop and think about the custodians, who work hard to keep our school clean. Instead of writing in permanent marker, use a sticky note to get your message across; it is going to save the administration a headache and improve the overall appearance of our school.