TikTok Vandalism Trend Causes Chaos

Walking into school bathrooms during a pandemic, it’s expected that there will be soap to wash your hands. However, at Woodstock Union Highschool, a viral trend on social media app TikTok has encouraged students to vandalize school bathrooms, resulting in stolen necessities, distressed staff, and angry students.

The vandalism here at Woodstock entails ripping soap dispensers off the wall, stealing paper towels rolls, and even taking down a stall door. The trend inspires students to take school items, typically from bathrooms calling them “devious licks”, meaning the riskiest or most valuable steal.

One student cited that they walked into the bathroom with other students attempting to unscrew the stall door off the wall. On the app, there has been a variety of stolen items from schools that could lead to serious legal issues, considering most are real crimes. These range from thousand dollar microscopes, a scoreboard, a toilet, a urinal, a car door, a projector, a smartboard, etc. which are just examples of just how far a trend will go.

When the first incident occurred here at Woodstock, students and staff were perplexed as to how to go about the situation.

“I think it just paints a bad picture of the student body, and makes us seem like we're immature and don't have common sense. It's a very bad way to affect kids later on in life, it’s not a positive influence to teach kids that it's okay to steal,” reports Junior Sam Leggett.

It was quickly decided that students start signing out of classrooms and taking hall passes with them to the bathroom.

“They are very unsanitary, and I think people will still go into the bathroom with the hall passes. I think setting more consequences for things that have happened, but not necessarily the hall passes because that's not doing anything. ” Kelly Jackson says, concerned about the health risk this solution imposes. This opinion is shared among most students who are unfairly dealing with the consequences of the vandalizers.

“I don't like carrying around a piece of paper that big around the hall. They are really unsanitary, especially in these covid times,” Senior Robby Macri also voices his concern about the shared use of hall passes during the pandemic. Although this trend has caused a lot of issues and serious damage, it seems as though the message got across to the responsible students, as controversy that had risen shortly after the vandalism slowly died down as the week went on.

“I think that one important thing to notice is that it is a trend, and just like every trend on social media it will pass, and I think it’s the most natural way to stop it because no ones going to do this when no one else is doing it. All trends die out within a month,” Sam concludes.