About paper towels

This is a blog post about paper towels.

I spend a lot of time in schools.
I see a lot of school bathrooms.
I see staff bathrooms and student bathrooms. I see bathrooms in buildings that opened last year and in buildings that have been open for over a century. I see sinks at various heights and rooms that don't have mirrors and not as much graffiti as maybe you'd think.
And paper towels.

While we've been having this attempt to switch to hand dryers (despite the impact on student hearing and their possible ick factor on bacterial spread), most school bathrooms still have hand towels.

If you're an adult and you think "school paper towels," you probably are thinking what I am: they're brown and they come on a roll and they probably come out of a dispenser that has a crank on the side.
And what do we all know about the brown paper towels?
If the point is to dry your hands, they're not very good at it.

What I have been noticing is that I very rarely see those paper towels at all anymore. What I see more often is what the photo is above: the towels are white and softer and they actually absorb water.
Paper towels, like a lot of things in schools, are more complicated than they look; we should be weighing cost, and environmental impact (white = bleach), and ease of use, and many other things.
At the end of all of that, though, if the kids' hands aren't dry, we haven't achieved what we set out to do when we bought the paper towels.

I've been thinking about this as we head into budget season not only because Worcester does still use brown paper towels*, but because we have, I think, a lot of things like this in education. We do things because they sound good or we argue that they sound good or they are appealing, but we don't ask if they actually work for those we're educating.

As we go through the budget process in districts this year, I hope we all are asking if things work and if they actually serve our students.
Otherwise, it's brown paper towels.


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*not surprising when you've been funding facilities at 60% of foundation