Mountain Vista High School bathrooms may be the reason I get the flu this season.

It is easy to say that schools are not generally the cleanest, healthiest places in the world, but as long as you cover your mouth when you cough, take your vitamins, and wash your hands, you should be safe from getting sick, right? Not quite.

No matter how bad I want to wash my hands at school, it is pretty hard to do so without soap. This trend, has been going on since I was a Freshman and it is ridiculous. I’ve seriously started bringing my own hand sanitizer to school because there is frequently no soap in the bathrooms.

So, I did a little experiment. For the past two days, I went into every girls bathroom at Vista and evaluated which ones had soap. This was my result: for two days straight, only three out of the six bathrooms had soap (the bathroom in the band hallway was locked).

This means that for two days, every girl who has used the upper, lower, and 200s bathroom did not wash their hands with soap. This also means that germs are spreading like wildfire.

Hannah Patrick, 12, admits that she went to three different bathrooms to find soap. “There was no soap in the girls bathroom, so I went into the boys bathroom desperate to clean my hands, but they were also out,” Patrick said. “Eventually I went to the science class where they had soap.”

Other students also notice this. I interviewed three different girls with the question, “What are your thoughts on Mountain Vista bathrooms?” and these were their responses:

“No one knows how to flush a toilet and there’s never any soap,” Natalie Higham, 12, said.

“A sink disappeared, it smells bad, and there’s never any soap,” Molly Phelan, 12, said.

“Going to the bathroom at Vista is something most kids avoid. It’s not clean, there’s no soap, and all of the door locks are broken,” Katie Wright, 12 said. “I think spending money on soap is more beneficial than buying macbook pros.”

Every person that I interviewed made the same point: why is there no soap?

With the flu on a rampage this year, this is not a time to mess around with hygiene. According to NBC News, 63 people have died from the flu this year so far.

Mountain Vista, I usually do not have complaints. I enjoy school. I do my work, participate in school events, play sports, but seriously, something needs to be done about the bathroom situation because I really do not want my cause of death to be the Mountain Vista bathrooms.