I don’t normally have much good to say about Richmond Public Schools, but the system deserves credit for this: The school board found $350,000 this year to finance a “bathroom blitz.” With significant assistance from community volunteers, the school system made tremendous progress this summer bringing school bathrooms into a state of cleanliness and good repair.

The school system was able to improve about two-thirds of the 44 schools’ bathrooms by the beginning of the school year, and will continue work on the others this fall, reports the Richmond Times-Dispatch. 

“We still have a lot more to do, but we made a lot of headway,” said Superintendent Jason Kamras.

So far the division has replaced:

• 200 paper towel dispensers
• 150 toilet paper dispensers
• 150 soap dispensers
• 260 faucets
• 170 sinks
• 20 stall doors
• 200 stall locks
• Three toilets
• 100 ceiling tiles

More than 50 bathrooms were freshly painted.

Clean, functional bathrooms are a bare minimum standard. The willingness of the school system to allow the bathrooms to deteriorate before now was disgraceful. Kudos to Kamras, who is new to the job, and to the school board for finding the money and mobilizing the volunteers to get the job done. The next step is to permanently reallocate funds to the maintenance budget to ensure that bathrooms continue to meet basic standards on an ongoing basis.

The City of Richmond doesn’t have to spend hundreds of millions of dollars building and renovating new schools. The Commonwealth of Virginia doesn’t need to issue $3-$4 billion in bonds for the same purpose. Instead, school systems need to stop deficit spending. And let’s be clear: Deferring basic maintenance is a form of deficit spending.