Social media peeing trend negatively impacting local schools

OZARK, Mo. — At Ozark High School (OHS), students and staff are having to work around a nationwide social media trend that is making custodial staff across the country's lives difficult lately.

The trend doesn't seem to have an official name, like the 'Tide Pod Challenge' or the 'Cinnamon Challenge, ' but it's more unsanitary.

Videos showing anonymous students at the high school and collegiate level, peeing on random things in bathrooms, or worse, peeing on random things outside the bathroom.

"Our custodians kind of brought that to our attention, and we noticed that throughout the week that began to escalate. On Friday, we had some problems and we decided we needed to do something about it," Dr. Phillip Witt, principal of Ozark High School, said. "We've always had to deal with bathroom shenanigans. It's one of the places where we don't have cameras and can be a place where some behaviors occur. This one just got a little further out of hand than we really wanted to see, which is why we had to respond, I think, a little more firmly than we would have like to."

Given the time commitment it would take to fully ensure clean bathrooms after each attempt of the trend on top of the already busy day of custodians, OHS decided to act rather than wait.

"On Sunday evening, we sent out that message to our students and our parents let them know that our restrooms were clean, and ultimately, we were going to try to do something about that. We believe it was connected to this social media trend, and we decided to close down some of the restrooms here at the main campus so that we could better monitor those and make sure that we were supporting our custodians, keeping restrooms clean, keep kids safe," Witt said.

Many wonder how closing bathrooms and funneling the students to a few—the district recently changed the closure to allow a couple more restrooms to be opened—would help the situation.

"Our decision to close some of the bathrooms we decided to close some of those that are least used and more prone to kind of bad behavior because there's not a lot of kids coming and going from some of those restrooms. We wanted everybody to come to these more common spaces so that we could better keep eyes on who's going, you know, when something might happen. We are utilizing our custodial staff and our administrative staff to check restrooms and make sure that things are staying clean throughout the day," Witt said. "We had a great day yesterday. So that was a real positive for us."

Others have commented in response to Ozarks First's initial story about the closures about how videos are being made in a school that is required to comply with a recent Senate Bill that prohibits cell phone use during school.

"Some of it has started out during school hours. but a big portion of that has been outside of school hours, even outside of the walls of the school building," Witt said. "We're not checking backpacks. We're not asking them to check in a phone anywhere. We're just letting them know this is our rule. If we do see a phone or if they're violating that policy, they get confiscated for the day."

Witt is just one principal dealing with the issue.

"This trend is not just an Ozark thing. I've talked to some of my peers at other schools and even colleges and universities that have said they're facing the same thing, just to varying degrees. This isn't unique to us, and we also believe it's not a large group of kids. Most of our kids are really great students. I think this is just a couple of students that are creating some distractions with some social media things," Witt said. "On Friday night, we had football at Republic, and I ran into the principal there, and was just asking, how their day went, [and in that conversation], we found out we were both facing some of the same challenges in terms of student behavior that day."

OzarksFirst reached out to Nixa, Republic and Willard Schools to see how, if at all, the trend has impacted them.

A representative for Nixa Schools says they have not had to deal with the trend, where Republic and Willard both say they've each had one instance of the trend, but both separate instances have been handled by administration.

Republic and Willard officials declined an interview because they did not want to draw more attention to the topic.

Witt is hoping the closures spark a conversation between parents and students about proper bathroom etiquette and maturity.

"The purpose of the closure and the email to parents was to encourage them to talk to their kids and be aware about what's going on on social media, have a conversation about respecting custodians, respecting facilities and taking pride in, in your school. I think that that is the goal by sending those messages out with the closure," Witt said. "We don't expect this to be a long-term thing. We want it to be a short-term thing and get back to normal as quickly as possible, but I do think talking about it, having a conversation about it is the first step in getting some of these kind of things to stop."

As for the person or persons behind it, if they're caught, Witt said the punishment can vary.

"It just depends what we discover. We've chased a lot of kind of false leads, tips and things that, people think they know who's doing what. ultimately, it's going to come down to a case by case basis, and on the most extreme, that's working with law enforcement on some of these issues that would go all the way to vandalism outside of our school day," Witt said.