If your child HAD to use the bathroom and they left the class without permission to do so, should they get a referral from their teacher?

In case the title doesn’t process properly, it’s asking if a child should get a referral due to walking out of class/disobeying the teacher’s order due to them needing to use the bathroom badly.

The following is from middle school btw.

I found a debate about a teacher who wrote a child a referral because he said he really needed to use the bathroom, she said no, he could not use the bathroom during her class at all, and he walked out of class anyway to do so which she said was very disrespectful and dangerous as she couldn’t be accountable for him once he left. She said he was not welcome back in class and she locked him out of the room and wrote him a referral.

You can skip all of this below if you just want to get right to the point and describe your own thoughts without reading other stances. Stances below for ideas on solutions/policies/arguments/etc.

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Here were the stances from people:

1. One teacher said that she should have never written him a referral, and she should never have locked him out as he is her student/her responsibility. She should have allowed him to return in case there was a fire drill/some other thing that required accountability of the classroom shortly after.

2. One teacher said it was ridiculous/cruel to write a child a referral for a bathroom issue. When you have to go, you have to go, and she said if she had been told no but she really had to go, she would have left, too.

3. Another teacher said every child needs to be allowed to go to the bathroom when requested because you can end up with a literal mess on your hands and an angry parent/child if not. You never know when a child will have an emergency period issue, upset stomach, UTI, general kidney/bladder conditions, etc. One teacher expressed agreement with this as she told a teenage girl one time ‘no’ and the girl accepted the answer, but at the end of class there was a bloody chair left behind and blood all over the girl’s pants, making the teacher feel bad.

4. One teacher said too-frequent bathroom breaks can be a problem so she only allows for bathroom emergency situations for kids to leave the class, and she said her policy works really well as it teaches the kids to hold it if it’s not super urgent, but if it is really urgent, she’s not denying them that, either. If she doubts their urgency with the younger children, she makes them do a ‘potty dance’ before leaving which weeds out the serious/nonserious requests.

5. One teacher agreed with the original teacher and said no bathroom breaks during her class ever. If the kid leaves the class, she can’t see them and can’t be accountable for them.

6. A parent stepped in and said she has already instructed her child to walk out of the class if they are ever denied the right to use the bathroom, and if the teacher writes a referral for that, she will be in the principal’s office ASAP to discuss. Some teachers agreed with this saying that a referral was completely out of line and over the top.

7. A child stepped in and said that they would gladly take a referral over shitting their pants in front of everyone, so this referral probably wouldn’t teach the kid a lesson anyway, and would just create an unnecessary disciplinary record for a bathroom issue.

8. A teacher said kids were asking too often to go to the bathroom, so she gave them 5 passes per semester in case of emergencies, and her policy worked very well.

9. A teacher said only students with a documented bathroom related issue would be allowed to leave the class. Any other emergencies would have to wait.

10. One teacher said even if it didn’t seem fair, the child was right to get a referral as the teacher has to show the other students that that behavior isn’t ok and all orders should always be followed.

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Of those thoughts above, which do you fall under, or have you got a different thought entirely? If you were a teacher, how would you handle/assess bathroom requests? If you were a parent, how would you feel about the referral?

Let TOM know. 😎