ASHBURN, Va. – The Loudoun County School Board will hear a plan to increase safety in bathrooms and locker rooms amid growing concerns over violence, sexual assaults and drug use in institutions around the D.C. region.
FOX 5’s Melanie Alnwick reports students and parents have said vaping and drug use runs rampant in school bathrooms, and administrators say they don’t have enough security to police them all.
Loudoun County School Board to hear plan for bathroom, locker room safety
The Loudoun County School Board will hear a plan to increase safety in bathrooms and locker rooms amid growing concerns over violence, sexual assaults and drug use in institutions around the D.C. region.
Alnwick says this proposal may help with some of those concerns.
A series of issues over the years led up to the plan. In May 2021, a sexual assault was reported in the bathroom at Stone Bridge High School. A student was stabbed in a bathroom at Mount Vernon High School in Fairfax County in 2022. Earlier that same year a teen was shot in a bathroom at Magruder High School in Montgomery County. Most recently, student overdoses were reported in Arlington and Montgomery County schools.
Since the Stone Bridge incident, Loudoun County has been working on a project that would add more single person private restrooms for students and staff that prefer to use those.
On average, each high school would have six private bathrooms, middle schools would have four, and elementary schools would have two.
In addition, locker rooms in middle and high schools would be altered to provide private shower and changing room compartments.
More private spaces would also help address some of the controversy over transgender student restroom policy.
The remodeling project would cost almost $11 million which lcps has already budgeted for and would take a few years to complete.
School board members will get a project update Tuesday afternoon.
