It’s third period. You fidget in your seat, cast a glance at the classroom door. You’ve had too much water, coffee, something like that. You need to pee.

You raise your hand and wait for the teacher to call your name. In your situation, minutes pass like hours. Your teeth grind as you survey the other students around you, the few other raised hands.

The teacher calls someone a few seats ahead of you, who says something about the lesson. Another student chimes in and pulls the discussion into a tangent. As people start talking, you feel chills.

The teacher insists on returning to the lesson. Seeing your hand raised, they point to you. The whole class’s attention shifts to you as your leg stops bouncing, your arm lowers, and your mouth opens to speak.

“Can I please use the bathroom?”

Your teacher lowers the dry-erase marker, angles their shoulder toward your general direction.

“No,” they say. In the same breath, they continue lecturing. Pain shoots through both your heart and your abdomen, and you are crushed realizing there are 23 minutes left in class.

This has never been uncommon. As certain students turn bathrooms into vape lounges featuring decorative toilets, administration attempts to buckle down on the issue of student vaping. Not being allowed to use the bathroom during class is now a common occurrence.

It’s understandable that students who regularly leave class for 10-15 minutes at a time should lose bathroom access. They’ve abused that right, which shouldn’t be given back to them unless they prove they deserve it – but in the case of something as necessary as the bathroom, the few shouldn’t ruin it for everybody. People need bathrooms.

One might argue students can use the bathroom during passing periods, but this isn’t the case. If a bathroom isn’t locked up, it’s got a line out the door. There isn’t enough time to go and get to class. This is the case more so in girls’ bathroom than in boys’, where urinals are greater in number and efficacy. I’ve seen girls slip into the boys’ bathroom, because the comfort of the girls’ room isn’t worth the wait.

Passing periods aren’t enough for everybody. To limit bathroom time to five minutes isn’t possible or fair to students.

This doesn’t even consider women’s hygiene. Many students can recount a menstrual emergency happening in class, and asking a teacher to use the bathroom. When met with “no,” they are forced to embark on the struggle of communicating to the teacher the nature of the situation without announcing “I’m on my period.”

Students are typically forced to one of four options. They can tell a room full of their peers they’re on their period and need to go, leave for the bathroom anyway and face disciplinary repercussions, wait until the end of class and risk bleeding through their clothes (becoming both an embarrassment and a biohazard), or widen their eyes and make hand gestures while emphasizing “it’s an emergency” until the teacher finally understands what they’re saying.

The increased restrictions make a spectacle and an ordeal of women’s bodies, humiliating students and disrupting class with a subject to which many students respond immaturely.

It’s not that teachers need to let students leave the room as they please: the teachers aren’t the ones at fault (and not all students should be trusted). Rather, administrators need to trust teachers’ judgment in deciding which students have earned bathroom access.

Some teachers say they’re not allowed to let students go without a pass, or they “can’t let you go” because they’ll get in trouble.

Not only does this take a toll on the bladders (and the attention) of students, it also belittles teachers in implying they aren’t capable of deciding if students can be trusted.

These teachers are competent adults who develop adequate understandings of their students within the first few weeks of school. Most parent-teacher conferences will prove teachers report accurately on students’ strengths and weaknesses.

There are ways to minimize student bathroom access abuse: one is by permitting students to use the bathroom if they leave their phone on the teacher’s desk. Another is letting students use the bathrooms on conditional terms.

If students prove they can’t be trusted with bathroom access, teachers can revoke those privileges, citing past behavioral issues. If students change the way they act for the better, they can earn the right to use the bathroom again.

In not letting teachers decide which students are allowed to leave, administrators send a clear message: they don’t believe teachers can make educated, thoughtful decisions in controlling their classrooms.

Not everybody should be allowed to leave the room. Certain students abuse their rights to the bathroom, and many don’t even go there. Teachers know this. They also get to know their students as people, and find out soon who is up to no good when given too much freedom. With that information, they can decide for themselves who to send to the bathrooms.

In giving them freedom to send students to the bathroom, the administration communicates they trust their teachers. Students hoping to regain bathroom rights will be motivated to perform and behave better in class, cementing better classroom etiquette.

Most importantly, it means students can use the bathroom during class, shortening the lines during passing periods. The horror of “holding it” for 20 minutes will be a distant, though traumatic, memory.