Natasha Vaughn-Holdridge is reporting for Columbia-Greene Media that incidents of vandalism centered on two boys' bathrooms in the Germantown Junior-Senior High School have recently taken place and school district officials have decided to address the problem by keeping those bathrooms open. There have been no incidents of vandalism or vaping in the girls’ restrooms. “It was stuffing toilets with paper towels, writing graffiti, vaping in the bathrooms, congregation of students while they’re supposed to be in class,” Superintendent Benjamin Bragg said. The vandalism has required the staff to put in extra time to clean the rooms, Bragg said. Since high school principal James DiDonna made the decision to keep the doors open, the vandalism and vaping have stopped. “It has been brought to our attention that some individuals have an issue with the junior-senior high school boys’ bathrooms being permanently opened,” DiDonna wrote in a letter to district parents last week. “Just for everyone’s information, the elementary bathrooms are permanently opened as well. We have had two ongoing issues with these particular bathrooms.” Bragg said keeping the doors open does not present any privacy issues. "The bathroom stalls and the urinals are not visible from outside the bathroom with the doors open," he said. “We’re doing the best we can until we find the culprit.... Unfortunately,...we can’t pinpoint who it is. In other districts I’ve been in, kids do the same thing and I was able to afford monitors. This district is very tight with [its] budget and it’s not affordable for us,” Bragg said. There are no cameras trained on the bathrooms, DiDonna said. “If privacy is an issue, we have other single-person-use bathrooms available to all our students,” he wrote. Read the full story at HudsonValley360 [dot] com.