The 2021-2022 school year has been nothing short of a game of Jumanji, each week a new form of chaos has been introduced to the halls. Over the last few weeks, the newest high jinks to enter our doors were the vandals of LHS, influenced by a not-so-funny Tik Tok trend. 

The recently viral practical jokes, nicknamed “devious licks”, kicked off the school year with a bang all over the country. Depicted in the 15-second videos posted by countless students, are the “licks,” or stolen property that each student has taken from their school. It became a bit of a competition for students as to who can reach the most views. LHS is no exception, with students targeting bathrooms. 

At first, these pranks were comical to most of the student body, but once they escalated, they quickly didn’t seem so funny. Each day, a new bathroom was shut down due to vandalism. Soon enough almost every bathroom was shut down, forcing students to walk the entire school to find one open. 

Every day our custodians have to clean up after those students who are not respecting our school. The last thing our custodial staff needs is to clean up actual human secretions and repair the broken equipment in each bathroom. We should be helping our custodians, not making their job harder. This is about respect. Due to the increase of maintenance work, they have been forced to clean up excessive damage in addition to their everyday tasks instead of getting well-deserved rest. 

The custodians at our school are not our mothers, and we are not toddlers anymore. Students shouldn’t be making unnecessary messes for them to clean up, and we should know how to properly behave in public settings. The school is not going to tolerate childish behavior. We need to grow up and compose ourselves.

We even got our privileges back after the administration thought it had died down. How did we treat this change? Shoved water bottles down the toilets to make them overflow and covered the stall walls with obscenities. 

Many of us thought the “devious lick” hurricane blew over—apparently, that was not the case. Please do not add to the storm, and instead respect the privileges given back to us. Be considerate of other students’ needs and the hard work of our amazing staff. 

If you see a member of our custodial staff around the school, take a second to thank them for all they have done to not only restore our school, but for all the sanitization and cleaning they have done to keep our student body safe. They deserve more than our past actions so be kind. 

Custodial staff, thank you from the bottom of our hearts for all the hard work you have put into restoring our bathrooms.  We are sorry for how they have been treated. We hope that for everyone’s sake, especially and most importantly yours, that this all ends soon. But we wish it would never have started in the first place.