It’s a warm summer evening, and Campus Supervisor Aurelia Bea is on a ladder, dipping her paintbrush into the dark green paint bucket, her mother below applying a sticker onto a bathroom wall.
Bea and her mother went through campus, bringing color and life into every bathroom in the school. Bea was tasked with beautifying the bathrooms during the pandemic and had to begin a search for ideas. “Some of the concepts I came up with just through things I saw online,” Bea said
The man behind the idea was Principal Richard Nash. When Nash first started at Poway, he found that a big complaint was the terrible state of the bathrooms. They were constantly being vandalized, and trash was not being picked up by most who used them. His team agreed on a solution to renovate the bathrooms, keep them cleaner and add artwork, and make them more inviting to students. Bea got creative with the themes, with some of the boys’ bathrooms getting ones such as video games and graffiti art, and the girls’ getting floral and ocean themes among others.
Since the new improvements, destruction and general uncleanliness has plummeted in the bathrooms. “This old saying about a broken window in a factory, that the broken window will multiply itself if you don’t fix it because people will see it broken, and treat it like a broken building,” Nash said. People saw dirty bathrooms, so they treated them like dirty bathrooms, but now they go in and it feels nice, so they leave it nice.
It has been a positive experience for students, although some have found slight inconvenience in the C bathroom being closed.
So far, Titans seem to agree. “I think the murals are cool, I think the paintings are cool, I think it’s cool they switch it up a bit,” freshman Junior Barsana said. Students find it refreshing to have unique pieces of art in something more mundane.