When people get done using the bathroom, most go to wash their hands. After washing their hands, they need a way to dry their hands before going back to class. Bismarck High School only offers hand dryers. There is one student bathroom that I know of that has paper towels and this is the smallest bathroom. I think that BHS needs to add paper towel dispensers to every bathroom for students to use.
Ever seen the videos? Those where the creator takes a black light and shines it on the wall that the hand dryer is on. The wall glows like a thousand glow sticks. When hand dryers are used, hands are put underneath the dryer and it blows air automatically. After washing hands, they are clean but wet. Because hand dryers blow straight germs in its air, by using hand dryers, germs get blown onto the cleaned hands. Also, the air that gets blown, touches other objects. This includes the soap dispensers, the sink, the students’ clothes, their faces and other things in the restrooms. There can also be germs on the dryer part itself which just blows germs onto a student’s hands.
Having paper towels in the bathrooms would also allow students to get back to class faster. When taking a long time in the bathroom, students can use the excuse “Oh, I was making sure my hands were dry enough.” While this isn’t the best excuse, it could be used. With paper towels, it would be very hard to make that excuse. Using three paper towels maximum (depending on the length dispensed) would already have the student’s hands dry. Plus, I as a female student know that the bathrooms in between periods get very busy. Having paper towels would allow other female students to dry their hands fast, so there aren’t three of us waiting for a hand dryer to be available.
Almost all the time, hand dryers blow cold air onto the students’ hands, which not only takes longer to dry but is also less likely to kill germs. When using paper towels, students could easily warm up their hands as the towels would be at room temperature. Being able to warm up their hands in the warm water that they used to wash their hands will warm them up further, rather than blowing all the warm water off and making a student’s hands cold again.
BHS should replace all of their hand dryers with paper towels. This will help prevent germs from spreading throughout the school, make bathroom trips faster, and arguably be more environmentally friendly than hand dryers. I believe that BHS would greatly benefit from having paper towels in the student bathrooms.
