Southern Alamance Middle School, in Graham, North Carolina, recently came up with a novel way to combat student distractions from social media.
The problem: Educators noticed a spike in the number of students asking to leave class—sometimes as frequently as nine times per day—to go to the bathroom, where they made TikTok videos.
The solution: Administrators decided to remove the bathroom mirrors that students used to film TikToks and primp for their close-ups. They also introduced an online system that issues students digital hall passes when they want to be excused from class and that allows administrators to track students’ locations. Administrators say they’ve seen a drastic decrease in bathroom visits since. (Should schools ban phones altogether? See our debate.)
“Toilettoks”—a genre in which students use school bathrooms for dance routines, lip-synching clips, or critiques of unclean lavatories—are one of the milder social media annoyances for schools.
Across the U.S., students have also used bathrooms as arenas to film and post videos of bullying, physical assaults on schoolmates, and acts of vandalism.
In March, the Alamance-Burlington School System announced that it was joining dozens of other U.S. districts that have filed lawsuits accusing social media platforms, including TikTok, of unfairly ensnaring young people.
“We’re seeing the negative impacts of social media on our students every day,” Kristy Davis, the acting superintendent of the Alamance-Burlington School System, says. “Their well-being has to be the top priority.”