A new $80-million vertical high school in Queensland is the first school in the state to be designed specifically without boys’ and girls’ separate toilets.
When Fortitude Valley State Secondary College opens in 2020, young students will only have access to 50 lockable ‘floor to ceiling’ gender-neutral toilet cubicles with shared basin areas.
The only exception will be two male and female toilets in changeroom facilities which won’t open until later in 2020.
Queensland Teachers’ Union president Kevin Bates said the new design was about “inclusion and accessibility,” arguing that gender-neutral toilets aren’t that “unusual” because “every toilet in our home is unisex.”
Brisbane education expert Michelle Mitchell told The Sunday Mail, “We already know some really bad things happen to kids in bathroom areas of schools — bullying, sexting, kids recording on mobiles, these things already go on when they’re just within their own sex, and then you’re adding in an extra element.”
Culture Watch commentator Bill Muehlenberg called the move, a “perilous direction” which must be opposed.
“The coercive utopians of the left are intent on stripping away the privacy and wellbeing of our students in the interest of further promoting radical gender-bending ideologies… it is a perilous direction to be moving in, and it must be resolutely opposed.”
Muehlenberg went on to say, “Suffice it to say that the leftist social engineers who are using our vulnerable children as guinea pigs in their radical social experiments need to stop — and stop now. How dare they assault our children to push extremist ideologies.”
Jarrod Bleijie, LNP Shadow Minister for Education, called the decision a “very bad move” by Queensland Premier, Annastacia Palaszczuk.
“I reckon boys and girls need and deserve their own privacy at school,” he said.
“How about instead of this PC rubbish the government spend more time helping our teachers with workload issues, air-con our schools, decluttering the curriculum, fix the school maintenance backlogs and better support our teachers in regional and remote Queensland.
“Labor have its priorities all wrong,” Bleijie added.
Queensland LNP leader, Deb Frecklington, also accused the Premier of having wrong priorities, saying, “Palaszczuk would be better off trying to lift our slipping education standards than continuously ramming this lefty PC garbage down Queenslanders’ throats.”
Last week it was revealed that since 2000, there has been a decline in Australia’s academic performance. The Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) measures 15-year-olds’ ability to use literacy, numeracy and science knowledge and skills to meet real-life challenges.
According to PISA, reading, math and science have been trending down since the turn of the century.