When Lindsay Breach gets home from a six-hour day at Corkran Middle School in Glen Burnie, her mother says she makes a beeline for the bathroom.
She doesn't like to use the bathrooms at school. They don't have outer doors.
"I don't want anybody looking in there or anything," said Lindsay. The sixth-grader worries eighth-graders would laugh at the sight of her adjusting her clothes or belt outside a stall.
Robert Janovsky, in his second year as principal of Corkran Middle, says he likes the doorless bathrooms because they are easier to monitor.
But other educators are critical. Even the Anne Arundel County Schools' psychiatrist compared the practice to living in a "big tent." Bathrooms at most schools in the Baltimore area are monitored by administrators, school officials say. Outraged parents at Corkran Middle have volunteered to monitor the bathrooms if the doors are returned.
"It's a part of how we monitor what's going on," said Janovsky of doorless bathrooms, which, according to him, keep preteens from smoking and goofing off in the bathrooms. "It does have a tendency to make sure it's a lot quieter."
He insists "the area of privacy is still maintained" because the stalls are not immediately visible from doorways. Students walk through a 6-foot hallway at the doorway, then turn toward the sinks, stalls and, in boys' rooms, urinals. The setup shields from view the main part of the bathroom. Janovsky said the school's 885 students, ages 10 through 13, have not complained.
But some of their parents were upset when they learned about the doors from a reporter. Corkran Middle's policy is unusual. Of Anne Arundel's 15 other middle schools, 12 have bathroom doors. The boys' bathrooms in Arundel Middle are doorless; Bates Middle School is built with concrete openings rather than doors; Crofton Middle keeps bathroom doors propped open.
Carroll and Howard County public school officials said they have never removed bathroom doors in their schools, and Baltimore County -- where doors were removed 10 or 15 years ago -- is putting them back under pressure from PTAs.
At some of the most troubled Baltimore City schools, such as William H. Lemmel, Thurgood Marshall and West Baltimore middle -- schools that are more likely to face problems such as students smoking, loitering or cutting classes -- principals were opposed to removing doors. They have a simpler solution:
