Water Breaks for Jesus

By Timmy Watson in News on Aug 12, 2007 1:30PM

We painfully remember a certain teacher at our high school that was completely and utterly against giving out passes to students to use the bathroom. Our syllabus at the beginning of the course had an entire page dedicated the many ways he planned on not letting miss days, let alone minutes, of his Marine Biology class. Which, on more than occasion, included watching Hawaii 5-0. We shit you not. The class, what we like to call, taking turns reading paragraphs out of the city approved Marine biology textbook, was two hours. We admit we occasionally took bathroom passes for granted, going to shoot some hoops or doing some crack in the bathroom. But, there are seriously times when a bathroom break is needed, especially for kids.

On Thursday a class action lawsuit was filed against Cuffe Math and Science Academy, 8234 S. Racine, because they only allow students one bathroom break a day other than during the lunch period. The incident that sparked the suit involved two seventh grade students who took an excessive bathroom break (their second of the day) and were suspended on July 12th. The suit is an attempt at prohibiting the rule from being enforced in Chicago Public Schools.

It is pretty common knowledge that students in school are not granted certain rights that are inherent in the normal/real world. For instance, the Supreme Court recently ruled against a suit against a school that suspended students for holding up a sign that said "Bong Hits 4 Jesus" at an Alaska school. The student who was suspended sued and it went all the way to the nations highest court. The Supreme Court left many questions unanswered in the case, stating that the Principal was in the right because the student was promoting drug use. We will have to wait and see what the courts have to say about limiting bathroom/water breaks, as well as the school's justification for the stiff penalty for peeing twice a day.