At any given time, hundreds of Wake County school and sinks and toilets don’t work.
Slow flush, no flush, leaking, sewage backing up, missing a seat.
Other WRAL Top Stories
They’ve even caused localized flooding in rooms below.
In some high schools, students and administrators blame vape pens being flushed — not malleable enough to make it down the pipe, preventing proper use without plumber intervention.
About 80% of schools had toilet issues and more than 60% of schools had sink issues, according to county health inspection reports for every Wake County school reviewed by WRAL.
The inspections, typically conducted every two years, also revealed widespread issues with heating, ventilation and air conditioning in most schools and ceiling and roof leaks in the vast majority of schools, some of them caused by plumbing and HVAC issues.
Sometimes, a school might have only a few nonworking fixtures. Other times, a school might have dozens of nonworking fixtures or entire bathrooms closed off.
Durant Road Elementary School’s most recent inspection, on Sept. 18, identified 10 nonworking toilets and issues with sinks, the playground, classroom trailers and ceilings.
“There was a time where I feel like probably more than half of our bathrooms were not working at the end of the school year,” said Taryn Murray, the parent-teacher association president at the Raleigh school.
Cleanliness was an issue, too.
“When my daughter started kindergarten, she would come home and tell me she didn't want to
go to the bathroom because there were bugs in the bathroom,” said Murray, whose daughter is now a second-grader. “And that broke my heart, because that's a basic human need.”
During Enloe Magnet High School’s most recent inspection, on Feb. 14, 2025, inspectors noted issues with toilets, sinks, ceiling and heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems. Ten toilets didn’t work and one bathroom had black stains that resembled mold, the inspection noted.
Broken toilets, sinks and inaccessible bathrooms are so common at Enloe that Rebecca Snowden and her daughter, Nora, have formed gameplans for how and when Nora can successfully go to the bathroom during the limited time between classes.
“There are some bathrooms that you can’t use,” said Snowden, president of the high school’s parent teacher student association. “There has to be a lot of rerouting of students because of that, and I think that’s just a fundamental need to be able to go to the restroom and feel safe doing that and that feel that your real basic need is heard by the state and people making decisions about funding.”
The problem isn’t just here. Across the nation, public health researchers have raised concerns about students not using the bathroom enough at schools. Children don’t do so for a variety of reasons, some of which relate to the conditions of those bathrooms.
Snowden and Murray see the broken bathrooms just part of a larger problem with facilities at their schools falling into long-lingering disrepair and addressed with bandage-type solutions rather than permanent fixes.
“Toilets are not repaired,” Snowden said. “They’re covered with plastic, and there’s no goal. There’s no timeline in doing the repair.”
Superintendent Robert Taylor told WRAL News he believes most bathroom issues get addressed, though he acknowledged that sometimes just means closing them off.
“Sometimes, it’s going to be roping something off,” Taylor said. “Every particular issue is going to have a different timeline in terms of how long it takes for it to be prepared.”
The availability of parts, staff and contractors can all contribute to a wait.
“We're not surprised by anything that may come up in the report, things are broken,” Taylor said. “That ends up on a list for repair that, at the appropriate time, we repair. The only issue that we would have — and we would agree with our public — is if something goes beyond the time frame that's expected in terms of it being repaired. That does become a concern to me.”
If the district can’t do a permanent repair at that time, he said, leaders try to do something to address the issue until they can.
The district is dealing with about $800 million in deferred maintenance, a total that hasn’t budged in a few years, despite increased investment toward it. It’s partly the result of prioritizing other spending — such as new schools and salaries — ahead of regular maintenance.
“We've had a lot of Band-Aid repairs, thinking about plumbing issues, toilets, just blocking them off so that they're not used,” Murray said. “And not actually fixing any of the issues.”
When it comes to ceiling leaks, oftentimes damaged ceiling tiles get replaced, but the leaks aren’t necessarily fixed, Murray said.
WRAL News reported last year that school board members had for years decided against district recommendations to spend more money on maintenance as the district added schools, in part to focus on raising employee pay.
“There's been just differentiation in terms of where that money gets allocated, and it hasn't been focused on maintenance,” Murray said.
Between staffing and funding, Snowden recognizes that some of the facility issues won’t be an easy fix. She doesn’t like the idea of sacrificing academics to improve facilities.
“I wouldn't necessarily want my kid at a brand new facility in exchange for the things that she's gotten at Enloe,” Snowden said. Snowden had seen facility issues at her daughter’s previous schools, too. If she could do it over and pick different schools, she says, she wouldn’t.
Her daughter can experience struggles and learn to cope with challenges at the school, Snowden said. Snowden loves the staff, administration and other parents at Enloe.
“As a parent, yes, I'm concerned,” she said. “But it's not so concerning that we have left the system. We have stayed. In fact, I have felt so mutually supported by the administration and by the parents, that it is enough to make me want to stay because that is how we do life, right? We get there are problems, we have to solve them.”
Separately, Wake high school students have complained of safety issues in bathrooms and said they wanted staff to better monitor them. That would include addressing vaping, smoking and drug use inside of them, as well as fixing broken stall locks and managing fighting and bullying in the bathrooms.
Inspectors have found challenges in lower-school bathrooms, as well. Entire bathrooms were closed off at the time of inspections at East Garner Middle and Vance Elementary.
More recently, Durant Road Elementary had to undergo emergency repair work for structural issues that engineers had determined made the school building unfit for occupancy. It was one of three schools with that issue, all built under the same design in the 1990s.
That work was completed Aug. 7, focused solely on the structural issues the district had contracted to fix. It didn’t include any work to address other concerns parents had.
Murray. The Durant PTA president, had wanted to take the extra time before moving students back this week to repaint hallways. That idea was turned down. The PTA could do it themselves if they raised the money, she said, but that’s more than the PTA can afford.