The new BHS features 40 gender-neutral single-stall bathrooms along the corridors and commons, with 71 individual bathrooms and gender-neutral toilet stalls throughout the school in total. The new school still has traditional gendered bathrooms, but the majority of bathrooms at the new school are gender neutral, with completely private single-stall rooms featuring full-length doors and a shared sink area with a window into the hallway outside.

“Students have choices about which they will use based on their own comfort,” Principal Westdijk said. “There’s not a one-type-fits-all approach, with the intent of feeling very welcoming and inclusive.”

The increase in gender-neutral bathrooms was advocated for by students in the district’s LGBTQ+ Task Force and the Gender Sexuality Alliance (GSA), who also pushed for gender-neutral bathrooms and locker rooms. 

According to Act 127 passed in 2018, all single stall bathrooms must be gender neutral in Vermont.

When the GSA was shown early blueprints for the new school, it identified problems such as including a small locker room area for trans and non-binary students, and coaches’ offices only accessible through gendered locker rooms.

“This assumed that all staff would always identify on the binary, and that a student would not have a PE teacher or coach of the opposite gender,” Librarian and GSA supervisor Shannon Walters said.

The GSA sent a letter to the Superintendent and school board arguing the school should be designed “for the next 50 years, not the last 50 years.” The architects, Freeman French Freeman with Drummey Rosane Andersen, incorporated single-stall changing rooms and bathroom stalls for all genders into the design due to student input.

“I have to say, I was really proud of our students,” Walters said.

Eliza Davison, a School Transformation Manager at Outright Vermont, said designing for people with the highest needs benefits everyone.

“So the idea is that while it might be most beneficial to trans and non binary students to have this new bathroom structure, everybody is going to find benefit in how that works,” Davison said.

For some students, the change addresses a daily stressor. Davison noted that choosing a bathroom can be an ongoing safety concern for some people.

“Figuring out which bathroom will be safest for is a constant struggle for some people, and [with the new bathroom style] they can just be like, we’re all using similar bathrooms, so my choice is not reflective of how people are perceiving my gender on this day or my safety on this day.”

The new design also addresses a longstanding frustration at the old BHS, where the downstairs gender-neutral bathroom – a single locked room – frequently caused students to miss significant class time while waiting.

“It’s annoying and inconvenient for the students who have to wait and miss class, instructional time and work time just to use the bathroom,” Brette Fialko-Casey ’27 said. “It’s annoying for our teachers who have to be like, ‘well, now I have to re teach you what I just taught the class, because you missed 20 minutes just waiting [to use the gender neutral bathroom]’, and it’s annoying for the teachers and student support workers who have to police the bathrooms.”

The single-stall, fully private design is a departure from the open-gap stalls common in American schools since the early 1900s, which were adopted because they were cheaper to build, easier to clean and ventilate, and allowed access in emergencies. In addition, the open design made it easier to deter bullying, vaping, vandalism and other misbehavior.

During the “Devious Licks” TikTok trend of 2021, in which students videotaped themselves stealing items like soap dispensers from school bathrooms, former Principal Beaupre had BHS staff sit at a table outside of the upstairs restrooms to discourage vandalism. BHS also installed vape detectors in the bathrooms briefly, but removed them after too many false alarms because the detectors could not distinguish between a vape and an aerosol deodorant or perfume.

In the new school, vape detectors will not be installed right away. Principal Westdijk said they will make a decision after seeing whether they are needed, rather than “making a significant investment before we have data that proves it’s needed to address a safety/conduct concern.”

Fialko-Casey said that overall the new changes are good.

“I think that that’s just more places where everyone can use the bathroom. I think it’s gonna decrease wait times by a lot, and for people who don’t feel comfortable in that space, “Fialko-Casey said, “there’s gonna be gendered bathrooms anyway. They’re just gonna have to do what we’ve been doing for a long time and walk a little further.”