Students in Puerto Rico tired of attending classes in dilapidated public schools have used TikTok to expose the poor conditions in their buildings, putting education officials on the defensive amid renewed attention on a long-standing issue.
Alaisha Torres Soto, the senior class president at Luis Felipe Crespo High School in Camuy, said she was compelled to use TikTok to report the “poor conditions” of the bathrooms at her school earlier this month after not seeing any improvements.
One TikTok video shows a bathroom in such bad shape that it was locked and had an “entrance prohibited” sign, forcing students to leave school to go to a bathroom or wait until they get home when classes are over.
Torres Soto’s TikTok post about one run-down bathroom at her school resonated with students at other schools. Videos from students across the public school system posted and shared widely on social media showed abandoned school areas and bathrooms without soap or toilet paper, sinks draining straight to the floor, and dangling bathroom stall doors.
The videos use the phrase “uniforme completo” (full uniform) to poke fun at the irony of teachers and principals who are overly concerned about students’ correctly wearing school uniforms when school buildings are in disrepair.
“This not new. This is years in the making,” Torres Soto told NBC News in Spanish. “It’s not just my school; it’s most of the schools in the public system of Puerto Rico.”
“This is a violation of our rights,” she said.
Miguel Rivera, a teacher at a public school in Bayamón and a representative of the Puerto Rico Teachers Federation union, said he wasn’t particularly surprised by the deteriorating conditions of the schools shown on social media.
Rivera shared with NBC News over 100 reports the union has received from its members about neglected and deteriorating buildings across the island in 2023.
Rivera cited the case of a student who attended a school with bathrooms in such poor conditions that he would leave school and walk to a nearby gas station to use its bathrooms. One time, the student had held the urge to use the bathroom for so long that he didn’t make it to the gas station. The student developed intestinal issues after lacking access to appropriate bathroom facilities at his school, according to the union.
Torres Soto said her school has started to take some actions to improve its bathrooms’ infrastructure and cleanliness. But public school students are looking for further change, especially considering that the Puerto Rico Department of Education has a budget of nearly $2.5 billion, which is about $114 million more than the previous fiscal year.
The Puerto Rico Department of Education also has access to more than $3 billion in federal funding.
Unlike in the mainland U.S., the island’s public education system mainly serves low-income communities; the majority of middle-income and upper-income families use parochial or private schools. An estimated 70% to 80% of the Puerto Rican student population at any given school lives below the poverty line, according to numbers from the Puerto Rico Institute of Statistics.
Schools have also been operating in the shadow of a decadeslong financial crisis that was later worsened by multiple back-to-back disasters, such as Hurricane Maria in 2017, earthquakes and the Covid-19 pandemic, to name a few.
Since then, over 600 public schools shut down in Puerto Rico, and for the first time in the island’s history, charter schools were introduced into the school system. About 860 public schools remain open in Puerto Rico.
The Puerto Rico Department of Education did not respond to a request for comment about the students’ and the union’s allegations.
But Yanira Raíces Vega, Puerto Rico’s education secretary since November, responded to the social media videos on a local radio show on Feb. 12 saying, “I would also like to see TikToks of the schools that are already ready. … Let’s not miss the truth.”
About a week later on a local TV show, on Feb. 20, Raíces Vega said that school buildings’ “infrastructure had suffered so much, it would be unfair to make me responsible when I just got assigned to the Department of Education.”
Torres Soto said that all she and other students are doing is “making complaints about something we are experiencing.”
On the same local TV show on which Raíces Vega appeared on Feb. 20, another education official in charge of school buildings said funds are already allocated for some repair initiatives, adding that they “are moving forward” with some construction efforts.
A spokesperson with the U.S. Department of Education told NBC News in a statement that local governments are responsible for school facilities and their maintenance, adding that the federal agency is working with Puerto Rico “to ensure that students and families are benefitting from a school system that responds directly to their needs.”
“This effort will be a transformation of the current structure and will have increased pathways for communities to be closer to decision-making,” the statement read.
Torres Soto said that in the name of all students in Puerto Rico, she’s urging local officials on the island to use school budgets wisely.
“If we are the future of Puerto Rico, why don’t we deserve an adequate education? An adequate education in every sense,” she said, including clean and tidy facilities with the necessary school resources.
