If someone uses the restroom, normally they would walk out of the stall, go to the sink, and wash their hands. However, recently on campus, you can’t because soap dispensers have gone missing.

“I walked into the bathroom, and it looked like someone busted the soap dispensers off the wall and poured all the soap from the bag onto the floor,” freshman Wyatt Judge said.

It is not just soap though. Gender plates on restrooms were taken off. In some schools, the damage escalated to entire urinals and sinks. Kids have even been arrested on misdemeanor vandalism charges. At our school, administration had to get involved and emails were sent out to parental guardians.

What started it all was a viral video on TikTok where a student stole masks from a teachers classroom. This ‘trend’ has earned the title ‘devious lick.’.

“I just don’t get it.” a math teacher Bailey Tormey said. “It [the trend] just makes no sense because it’s a resource that’s for students, and they’re taking that resource away from themselves. A lot of the fun decorations teachers have around their classroom are paid for themselves, out of their own money. It goes from stealing from the ominous “school” to stealing directly from a teacher. It’s more personal.”

Enough people have started to get upset about this ordeal, and a reverse of the trend started up, called an ‘angelic yield,’ where people give to teachers and the school instead of take.

“Teachers do a lot for their students,” junior Justice Gill said. “I feel like we should have already been giving back to the school and staff members because they’re the reason we grow.” 

TikTok is a massive platform with over 1 billion users, each person having a chance to suddenly strike an overnight success. This is a major reason this trend took off. Hundreds of thousands of people saw it, and all of them knew if they were lucky, they would gain fame from other people thinking the ‘courage’ in defacing school property is funny.

“If you take a soap dispenser, you’re not going to get TikTok famous, you’re just going to prevent people from washing their hands.” Tormey said. “And now is not the time for people not to be washing their hands.”Devious Licks vs Angelic Yields

This trend has been dying down, and schools are finally getting to relax. Soap dispensers have mostly been fixed, and our nameplates back on. This trend has mostly subsided, we’ll see if it ever happens again.