A Logan state high school has started a two-week trial of locking all the gates on the toilets in the school during class time.
Shailer Park State High School has issued notice to students that if they need to use the toilet during class, they will need to follow a new process.
Students must leave their mobile phone on the teacher’s desk, report to the office and sign out a key before they can enter the toilet. Once finished, return the key, sign it back in and return to class and retrieve their mobile phone. Students are given 10 minutes to make this journey.
On the first day of the trial, today, there was a line of more than 40 students at the office in the first period wanting to sign out the key. Due to this, teachers without a class in that time were stationed outside the single allocated toilet block to monitor the students.
A source inside the school said it was chaos with students waiting well over their allocated time to get back to class.
“The office staff were being inundated and continually interrupted to sign the key in and out,” said the source.
The high school is currently in the process of installing vape and smoke detectors to deter and catch students using the toilets for this purpose.
Mobile phone use where students are texting and meeting in the toilets is also an issue at the school. The state governments no phone at school policy begins in 2024.