PITTSFIELD, Mass. — Two Taconic High School students have highlighted the importance of clean, accessible public bathrooms in the city.

A letter from sophomores Nick Kerwood and Eva Matkovska was brought forward at Tuesday's Parks Commission meeting.  

The students focused on public sanitation as part of a civics project for their history class after a meeting with Parks, Open Space and Natural Resource Program Manager James McGrath, analyzing the situation with Pittsfield's public restrooms and offering possible solutions.

They decided to write a letter to the commission that calls for more resources to address the issue. It was referred to the City Council and during the next fiscal year's budgeting, the communication may be cited as support.

"We know that this is a hard task to accomplish, but we as young community members would love to see this happen to keep our parks sanitary and more accessible for the people of Pittsfield," they wrote.

Kerwood and Matkovska suggested additional crew members in the Parks Department who could address the situation while reducing the amount of overtime.

"They have noticed over the years that there doesn't appear to be bathrooms in all of our parks, that sometimes the bathrooms are locked, other times they appear to have been vandalized and they are taken offline until we can fix them so they sort of posted the question 'What's going on and is there anything we can do to influence change?'" McGrath said.

"So I had a very frank and honest conversation with them about what we're seeing in our public bathrooms, the realities of how we staff them, how we open them, some are on automatic unlock or locks, some need to be physically opened and locked at the end of the day so it was very revealing conversation."

He shared multiple images with the students of vandalized bathrooms and the things that the Parks Department encounters on a daily basis.

"I shared horror stories but at the same time I also shared the reasoning behind bathrooms in parks is simply so that we can extend the stay of folks that are in parks," McGrath explained, adding that it does not matter who you are — when you need a bathroom you need a bathroom.

The students recognized that it is a "near impossible" issue to resolve but brought up a few ideas that could help.

"We believe that hiring a few additional members to clean and maintain the restrooms will benefit the people of Pittsfield. Hiring a few more crew members would make it quicker and easier to clean the bathrooms in the morning and close them at night. With a few additional people, it would be easier to reach all of Pittsfield in a shorter amount of time," they wrote.

"This would mean that you would need another cleaning van for the new hires to get around the city. Though this is expensive, it could prove to be very helpful. From what we have heard the current crew members often stay overtime and have to get paid for their extra services. We believe that if you hire another couple of crew members you might not see as much overtime as there was before."

Commissioner Anthony DeMartino said that this is a case in point that members of the public are indicating a need that the panel knows exists from a funding standpoint but unfortunately has no control over.

He pointed out that Councilor at Large Karen Kalinowksy attends commission meetings as a representative of the council.

"We've done this before other times when we've found needs to help support our parks and the support of them and things are beyond our control but now we have a little bit more of a direct link," he said.

Commissioner Simon Muil said if people have opinions about park aspects the should write letters and send emails to the panel so that it has an idea of what is important to the public.

"We can't always do something about then but at least if we know what's important, if we got 10 letters on one subject and none on another we know which ones are the important subjects," he said.

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