UK father criticizes school for removing urinals from boys' restrooms
Martin Howard, a concerned father from the U.K., told Fox News Digital about his children's school restroom policy that left him outraged.
A concerned father of four is facing charges after he challenged his sons' school for removing urinals from the boys' bathrooms, leaving four cubicles – or stalls – for 300 children to use in a restricted timeframe.
Howard said he believes removing urinals is a step toward transitioning to gender-neutral bathrooms and speculated that the end goal is to eliminate the single-sex spaces altogether.
"I think they're going to end up with gender-neutral toilets," he told Fox News Digital. "I have a daughter who's due to go to senior school two years. I don't really want her to have gender-neutral toilets… how would a girl feel in that environment? They need their own spaces.
"[That's when] I really started becoming active against them," Howard said. "They took all the urinals out of the boy's toilets. They have 300 boys, and they left them with four toilets but, not only that, they then took the doors off of the toilets [bathrooms] so that the boys couldn't congregate in the loos."
Howard said the institution – Sexey's School in Bruton, Somerset, England – also banned students from using the toilets during lesson time, leaving the large number of students with a narrow timeframe – an hour and 15 minutes out of a six-hour day – to use one of the four toilets, eat their food and more.
"Literally half of them are wandering around for the whole period of the day – more than half – are just holding it in, not even trying."
Concerned dad Martin Howard said the school is also displaying rainbow flags at times. (Fox News Digital)
After reaching out multiple times and receiving no responses that met his satisfaction, he went to the school in-person to investigate. He cited the UK's "implied right of access," the legal right to enter school grounds in certain cases.
"You can't just use that to wander into a school in the school day and start causing trouble," Howard said. "But after school, if you pick up your child and the child has forgotten their lunchbox, or you want to chat to the teacher or even to look at their books, we have quite a fluid system where parents go in and out, talk to teachers, have a look at the lost property box, look in their locker…. It's something that happens a lot."
In this case, however, he says school staff stopped him in his tracks.
"I was in there for what, two minutes looking around and finding out exactly what they were doing to the children, which I think is a human right. I really do. So I was checking that their rights have been respected, and they went mental over it, basically."
He sent his wife into the building separately weeks later to look for lunch boxes and PE-kits, but, despite multiple staff members noticing her walking around the school, no one stopped her.
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Urinals were removed from a U.K. boarding school, causing a father to challenge the move. (Stan Grossfeld/The Boston Globe via Getty Images)
He said he believes she was treated differently because staff members didn't suspect she was trying to investigate what they had been doing at the school.
"For my bit, they're giving me criminal charges, and they've tried to put me through the court, and that's still going on," he said, noting he has a court hearing scheduled for Thursday. The school had given police surveillance recordings of Howard wandering through the school, which he says, under data protection rules, are recordings he has a right to access.
"If you're on CCTV [closed-circuit television or surveillance], you can demand those tapes from any business, not just a school, and they have broken data protection rules in order to hide evidence. Because we've asked for the tapes of my wife wandering around the school, being escorted by teachers in some cases, and they've refused to hand them over."
According to U.K. outlet The DailyMail, "Section 547 of the Education Act 1996 makes it a criminal offence for a person who is on school premises without legal permission to cause or permit a nuisance or disturbance. Trespassing itself does not constitute a criminal offence.
"To have committed a criminal offence, an abusive individual must have been barred from the premises or have exceeded their 'implied licence', then also have caused a nuisance or disturbance."
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U.K. dad Martin Howard said he believes the decision to remove urinals at a local school is to transition toward gender-neutral restrooms. (Martin Schutt)
Video recorded on Howard's phone showed him "visiting four toilets after school and being told to leave by teachers," according to the outlet.
Howard told Fox News Digital no one was in the restrooms at the time since the incident took place after school.
"Ten-year-old kids are innocent sexually. They don't need interaction with people in the toilet environment. I just don't know what they're thinking, but it might take somebody to be raped in one of the toilets before they go, ‘Well, that was a bad idea,’ and you can see it coming. There's no need for it."
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Howard said the state-run boarding school has gotten "extremely weird" over time, explicitly asking students about sex in questionnaires, among other eyebrow-raising moves. He repeatedly wrote to his sons' teachers complaining about the discussions, the urinals and other controversial decisions, including displaying LGBT Pride flags and taking them down before being inspected by members of the Church of England and comparing all men to rapists.
"So you've got like a ten-year-old boy being asked questions about anal sex and how they operate sexually and things like that in questionnaires. I put in complaints and getting responses back that weren't very good at all or none at all.
"And then they're a Church of England School, and they went and put the LGBT flags up everywhere, but they take them down when they get inspected by the church and put them up the day later. So they hide it from the church when they get inspected by the church. I thought that was a bit dodgy."
Fox News Digital reached out to Sexey's School for comment, but did not receive an immediate response.
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