Restrooms are not peripheral spaces.
Restrooms are part of every student’s day, yet their influence on long-term facilities planning and student well-being are often overlooked.
While conversations about inclusive restrooms often focus on gender identity, new district-wide, longitudinal research from Saint Paul Public Schools (SPPS) expands the conversation, revealing how implementing inclusive restrooms as a facilities strategy can both improve students’ perceptions of safety while reducing operations and maintenance demands.
These findings reframe inclusive restroom design as an essential component of student-centered schools, not simply an equity strategy. The results are clear: for schools facing limited budgets and growing demands on facilities staff, implementing inclusive restrooms is an opportunity to respond to both student and staff needs.
About our research with SPPS
Cuningham’s longitudinal research with SPPS examines student experiences and operational needs in restroom projects across the district. An initial 2018 study at SPPS’s Johnson High School explored how students experienced the inclusive restrooms prototype. These findings were expanded by a 2025 study at SPPS’s American Indian Magnet School that included student perceptions in middle school environments. In 2024, a district-wide evaluation examined safety perceptions, behavioral patterns, and operational impacts across entire school buildings and campuses—situating restroom environments within the broader context of school climate and safety.
Reducing the burden on operations and maintenance teams
New findings suggest that the value of inclusive restrooms extends beyond students to on-site facilities and maintenance teams.
When restroom-related work orders at SPPS were analyzed, they revealed reduction in vandalism-related maintenance demands. Traditional, gender segregated restrooms generated 106 work orders per 100,000 square feet. Conversely, inclusive restroom models generated only six work orders per 100,000 square feet. Each work order required an average of seven labor hours, resulting in an estimated 700 hours of staff time saved.
For districts balancing limited maintenance budgets and staffing resources, the reduction in staff time enabled by inclusive restrooms offers an opportunity to alleviate the demands placed on facilities teams while freeing up valuable staff capacity and resource allocation.
Increasing perceptions of safety
When students were asked where they felt most unsafe during the day, restrooms ranked the highest. This is contradictory to many conversations about inclusive restrooms, where the assumption is that traditional gender-segregated facilities are inherently perceived as safer.
At SPPS’s Johnson High School, students identified restrooms as where they felt unsafe or very unsafe during the school day. Yet, when comparing restroom models, 61% of students reported feeling safer in the inclusive restroom environment than in the previous gender-segregated model.
Additional findings at American Indian Magnet School indicate similar positive safety perceptions of inclusive restroom models in a PK-8 setting. It the 2025 post-occupancy evaluation, 71% of students surveyed reported feeling safe using the inclusive restroom model. This highlights the importance of design considerations that give students greater privacy, autonomy, predictability, and choice – feelings all associated with fostering safety.
Post-occupancy data from Johnson High School also indicated that the ability to close restroom doors from the inside emerged as the single most influential design feature associated with feelings of safety and security.
Reframing how districts approach restrooms in facilities planning
Together, these findings expand the conversation about inclusive restrooms beyond equity, positioning them as critical infrastructure for student well-being and school operations.
For districts and design teams, the implications are straightforward: restroom environments are not neutral. They shape how students move through their day, how safe they feel in their bodies, and how much cognitive energy they expend navigating basic needs. And from an operational standpoint, they address the practical demands of supervision, maintenance, and long-term resource use.
School districts should consider restrooms as an investment in daily infrastructure that can improve operations and lower maintenance budgets, while create safe environments for students to meet their basic needs with dignity.
To learn more, read Cuningham’s case study, “Designing for Dignity: Inclusive Restrooms as Infrastructure for Student Safety, Health, and Well-being” for student and operational findings, design strategies, code guidance, and real-world examples that help schools create restrooms supporting safety, dignity, and belonging. Download at www.cuningham.com.
Cuningham is the sponsor for the Richard Green Scholar Program and is long-time business partner of MASA
