Parents and teachers listen during a Palo Alto school board meeting on May 10, 2022. Photo by Magali Gauthier.
At Tuesday’s meeting of the Palo Alto Board of Education, third grader Rupali Rao stood much smaller than the podium but spoke loudly into the microphone in her hand.
“I do not like that we have to share a bathroom with boys at Hoover,” she said. “A boy punched me in the stomach and spit on me. I really do not feel comfortable in an all-gender restroom.”
Herbert Hoover Elementary has been under construction since last year, and is set to reopen in the spring of 2025. Throughout construction, students have been attending classes at Greendell School, where some have complained about its multi-stall gender-neutral bathrooms. So when parents learned there were plans to only construct similar gender-neutral bathrooms in the new Hoover campus, they organized.
A group of Palo Alto parents created a petition, which now has nearly 800 signatures, demanding the district offer boys, girls and gender-neutral restrooms at Hoover to promote safety and inclusion.
“Children need to be allocated a safe space at school and feel safe in that space,” the petition reads, “The reality is Gender Neutral restrooms do not feel safe for all children.”
Currently, construction plans for the school include all gender-neutral restrooms, some multi-stall with height partitions and gap-free doors, and some single-use gender-neutral bathrooms, according to board president Jesse Ladomirak.
There are plans for eight single-use restrooms dedicated for student use, and another eight for staff and public use, Palo Alto Unified spokesperson Lynette White wrote in an email.
Nearly 20 parents and students took to Tuesday’s board meeting to voice their concerns, calling the current restrooms unhygienic and anxiety-inducing for young students.
Rao’s mother, Hiral Parekh, said as a feminist, she was raised to fight for her rights and now hopes to help her daughters do the same.
“These children have the right to comfort, privacy, health, gender expression and cultural and religious expression,” she said at the meeting. “Children’s perspective is completely missing here.”
Other parents said the bathrooms not only made their kids uncomfortable, their children often held off on using the bathroom and felt stressed and embarrassed when they did, including Carrie Law, who has a daughter in third grade at Hoover Elementary.
“She feels uncomfortable going to the bathroom with boys,” Law said.
While Law and the statement in the parent petition assured that the signatory parents are supportive of gender-neutral bathrooms in schools generally, they asked why gendered bathrooms won’t be an option on the new Hoover campus.
“I think having both the gender neutral bathrooms and also the separate boys and girls bathrooms to meet every single group’s needs is a truly inclusive and respectful environment for all students,” said Abraham Jun Zou, who has two daughters at Hoover.
Ladomirak and Superintendent Don Austin said plans to make PAUSD’s bathrooms completely gender neutral have been in the works for years. The board adopted general design concepts for gender-neutral restrooms at a board meeting on Feb. 9, 2021, and have since spoken about designs in nine other public meetings, Ladomirak wrote in an email.
Parents like Parekh, who helped create the petition, say even so, there wasn’t enough communication.
“People are working incredibly hard,” she said. “It is very hard for us to find time to read every little mini board update, and we do the best we can.”
Ladomirak is not surprised parents have additional concerns as new families have joined the Hoover community since the start of construction and says there is a need for further conversations.
“At this point, I don’t believe this is something that would need to come back to the Board,” she wrote in an email. “Design changes happen all the time on construction projects and rarely rise to the level of needing Board approval.”
Hoover Principal Nikole Manou, Assistant Superintendent of Equity and Student Affairs Yolanda Conaway and Director of Facilities and Construction Eric Holm, will host Hoover families for coffee to discuss construction concerns on Friday at 8:15 a.m. at Hoover, but the location may change due to high attendance numbers.
“With the Hoover opening at least a year away, there is plenty of time to consider the options,” White wrote.
