The Slippery Policy Implications of Soapsuds
EDITOR’S NOTE:
We recently published an opinion commentary by Teresa Mosqueda and Sally Bagshaw about the respective roles of government, neighborhoods, and business leaders in addressing post-COVID homelessness in our communities. This opinion commentary provides a personal perspective on how individual institutions and organizations must also wrestle with the complex problem of homelessness.
So often, public policy questions land with a bloodless thud. Governance fine print, regulatory tangles, legal ins and outs -- all can seem far removed from actual people.
One morning in 2016, a 30-something actual person was standing at a sink. She was producing one of the most treacherous (and most human) public policy issues I’ve ever confronted.
The woman was in the main ladies’ room of a classroom building on the Rockville Maryland campus of Montgomery College (MC). She was naked. She was soaping her body from head to toe, and then rinsing herself off. She was creating a huge puddle on the floor.
It was shortly before 8 a.m. Many classes were about to begin in that building. The restroom was full of students making a pit stop en route to those classes. They were surprised and put off by what they saw -- even more so when the woman revealed she was homeless.
The woman explained that she was using the restroom as a place to “shower” because she had no other way or place to do that conveniently.
The surprised students immediately reported the incident to campus security. It quickly bubbled up into a major issue for the college’s board of trustees. Although the board had (and has) no direct operational authority, we were asked by the administration to recommend a course of action.
Like every two-year community college in the U.S., Montgomery College is a public institution. Not only can anyone attend, but also all buildings are open to the public whenever classes are in session. More than three-quarters of the school’s budget comes from tax dollars.
The three MC campuses are an amazing tapestry of diversity. We have students who were born in more than 160 nations (that’s almost all of them). We provide academic counselors who can converse in more than 10 languages. We offer wraparound support to any student who needs it -- help with bus fare, wi-fi, even with electric bills if that’s what it takes to keep a student enrolled.
But does that mean that we need to be a bathroom of last resort (or first resort) for the homeless?
On one side of the debate: The moral imperative of caring about one’s fellow humans. No one chooses to be homeless. He or she is a victim -- of racism, of bad luck, of disease, of addiction(s). Can a public institution stand in judgment of someone who just wants to get clean?
On the other side of the debate: No college can function unless students feel safe and comfortable. Encountering a naked woman covered in soapsuds made several students uncomfortable. Not in the same way that the “safe spaces” debate has made some students psychically uncomfortable. Our MC students feared communicable diseases and/or possible assault.
Then the canvas of this narrative changed its colors abruptly. The homeless woman turned out to be a duly registered student. So did approximately 12 additional homeless students (some male, some female) who had begun using our restrooms as their avenue to cleanliness.
Yes, we could recommend that these students be suspended for unbecoming conduct. But our mission is to educate whoever wants to be educated. If we barred a homeless student, would we also bar someone who was unemployed, who had failed to brush his teeth after eating onions, who was in any way “different”?
How about trying microchipped entry cards for our bathrooms? No, too clumsy and too expensive. And really no different from barring the homeless entirely.
Arrange a one-hour window for the homeless to use the locker rooms in the gyms? What if a student-athlete’s shower was delayed and he thus lost a critical part-time job?
Our board finally recommended referring homeless bathroom users on our campuses to the non-profit organization in our county, which is already trying to help the homeless in all the obvious ways. We recommended suspending or barring the homeless if they create a public health or safety hazard (as judged by the administration on a case-by-case basis). At the same time, we sidestepped the much tougher question of what to do about homelessness in general. Alas, that’s not for a community college or its board to fix.
An educational institution should educate. But not for the first time and not for the last, that desire and that mission collide each morning with larger social realities and opportunities to educate in many ways other than just book learning. The result can be puddles of soapy water on bathroom floors and slippery slope questions that we must rise each day ready to answer.
About the Author:
Bob Levey is a retired columnist for The Washington Post. He has taught journalism at six universities. He is past president of the Alumni Board of Governors at The University of Chicago. He was named to the Montgomery College Board of Trustees in 2015 by Governor Larry Hogan.