An upcoming elementary school in Hanover County, Virginia, is set to be one of the first in the country built without gendered bathrooms, Richmond Times-Dispatch reported Wednesday.
The planned Gandy Elementary School's unique design will feature several separate, enclosed stalls within each restroom on every floor, architects at Crabtree, Rohrbaugh & Associates laid out in a school board meeting last week.
"Every single stall has complete privacy," designer Joshua Bower said. "The partitions go from the floor to the ceiling. There are no gaps between the door and the wall, and when you're doing you're private activities, you're doing them in the utmost privacy.
"When you're washing your hands, you're combing your hair, you're doing anything else, you're doing that in the quarter," he continued. "There's really no 'behind the wall' except for when you're doing things that are very private."
That model will be used only for floors containing grades two to five. For kindergartners and first graders, each classroom will feature its own bathroom.
"The goal of this design is to increase student safety and decrease potential damage to the bathrooms," Hanover County Public Schools spokesman Chris Whitley said.
However, the decision probably has more to do with new standards put in place by the Virginia Department of Education, the local paper noted.
The county's school board was under pressure to put in place specific guidelines regarding the treatment of transgender students pursuant to a 2020 law, with many believing the original proposals stopped short.
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