Answering a question
While watching Good Day LA today, on their "Big Deal/No Big Deal" feature, Maria Quiban suggested that school locker rooms could be retrofitted to provide enough privacy that having transgender students use the locker room of their self-identified gender wouldn't be prohibitively expensive.
Let's take a quick peek at Santa Monica High School. 3,100+ students. Six academic periods per school day. Daily PE classes. Just for the sake of argument, assume that 10% of the student population doesn't take PE due to waivers and having fulfilled the CA PE requirement prior to senior year (like I did). That leaves roughly 2,800 students who have to cycle through the locker rooms each day.
Current construction is lockers side-by-side and stacked. Square footage isn't going to be increased because every single square foot of the 26 acre campus is already in use for some purpose. How do you transform a community locker room to make it private without expanding the square footage? The simple answer is, you can't.
It isn't about gold fixtures. It is all about efficient usage of space. The only way to add space is to build and in this case, build upward. You'd have to do a major retrofit of both the Boy's and Girl's gyms in order to build them higher to provide larger locker rooms. That's a major expense, especially considering you'd have to move PE somewhere else during the construction.
Sorry Maria, it isn't economically feasible.
Let's take a quick peek at Santa Monica High School. 3,100+ students. Six academic periods per school day. Daily PE classes. Just for the sake of argument, assume that 10% of the student population doesn't take PE due to waivers and having fulfilled the CA PE requirement prior to senior year (like I did). That leaves roughly 2,800 students who have to cycle through the locker rooms each day.
Current construction is lockers side-by-side and stacked. Square footage isn't going to be increased because every single square foot of the 26 acre campus is already in use for some purpose. How do you transform a community locker room to make it private without expanding the square footage? The simple answer is, you can't.
It isn't about gold fixtures. It is all about efficient usage of space. The only way to add space is to build and in this case, build upward. You'd have to do a major retrofit of both the Boy's and Girl's gyms in order to build them higher to provide larger locker rooms. That's a major expense, especially considering you'd have to move PE somewhere else during the construction.
Sorry Maria, it isn't economically feasible.
posted by me at 8:24 AM
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