PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — Students at Philadelphia’s Southwark Elementary say they want faster action to fix the school’s chronically broken bathrooms. Superintendent Tony Watlington said he would visit the school this week to get a firsthand look.
Southwark students took their complaints to City Council last week, pleading for repairs to the persistently overflowing toilets.
“There’s literal sewage coming up from the floors,” said a fifth-grader named Olivia. “We can’t cover up the lack of soap, lack of paper towels, broken stall doors, the awful smell, or the amount of lost class time it takes for us to walk around the school just looking for a place to pee.
“Some of us choose to wait until we get home to use the bathroom. This isn’t fair and it isn’t right. The pipes need to be fixed so water and sewage doesn’t come up from the floors. Please, get us doors. Get us soap,” she said.
“How would you feel if every day you had to worry about the toilet flooding?” added a seventh-grader. “Having to ask a friend to keep the door closed for you because the doors won’t lock? A bathroom that smells repulsive. Worrying there isn’t a working soap dispenser.”
With only three working toilets serving 600 kids, students at the 115-year-old school say they have lost classroom time because they have to go from floor to floor in the building to find an open, working toilet.
Under the district's 10-year facilities plan, Southwark is in line for an overhaul in 2032. Speaking on KYW Newsradio’s After School podcast, Watlington said he would explore ways to get repairs done faster, but made no promises.
“We are looking to see how we can expedite to get some of the repairs that are needed — infrastructure included — faster through our capital budget, and not have to wait until the facilities master plan kicks in around 2031-32,” Watlington said. “We’re going to do everything we can to get the repairs made at Southwark as quickly as possible. I’m so serious about it, I’m going to Southwark myself this week to take a look.”
The district last week, in a statement, said during spring break earlier this month, “a maintenance service contractor performed a complete scope of the building’s drain system, including the soil lines extending to the street. This work involved using a camera to capture images of the interior condition of the pipes. The results did not identify any defects such as broken pipes, sagging lines, or active blockages. As a preventative measure, the contractor also cleaned the drain lines. The school experienced two main drain blockages that affected the entire building on March 5th and March 6th. In both cases, the blockage was cleared the same day.”
Watlington said the Southwark example makes the case for why the entire 10-year, $3 billion facilities plan should be adopted.
There are only three working toilets to serve 600 schoolchildren
There are only three working toilets to serve 600 schoolchildren
