The 2021 school year was expected to be different from previous years but stealing soap dispensers from the bathrooms wasn’t exactly the difference that was meant.
The Devious Lick trend on TikTok has high-school students stealing toilet paper, soap dispensers, and paper towels to exit signs, doors of bathroom stalls, and even class pets. Teachers find this extremely disrespectful towards the school and inappropriate on the student’s part.
“It’s super disappointing because we have a beautiful school and a great facility and kids don’t realize how lucky we are to have the facility that we do, and I think it’s also very immature because everybody here is in high school… and everybody knows better,” sophomore English teacher and school senate leader Angela Haskell said.
The trend was started when TikTok user, jugg4elias, posted a video of him with a box of disposable masks that he claimed to have stolen from a school. It started off as something that students found funny and participated in for their TikTok accounts. But it has spread into a much bigger problem, now that kids are getting punished seriously for trying out the trend on their own.
The lead belief of why the trend was started was so there was something to get popular from, and overall, something kids thought was entertaining. There was also a mention of students engaging in the trend because they felt as if their schools are just a place they are required to go to until they are allowed to leave, rather than somewhere they are welcome and are a part of.
“I think that just a lot of people just like to follow things on TikTok and go along with it and maybe they just want to become famous or well known for something, even though it’s stupid,” Haskell said.
Some of the ways schools have started to stop the trend is to shut down bathrooms, make school wide announcements about how serious the issue is, and even expelling or arresting students caught doing the trend.
However, just a brief time after the Devious Licks started, another new trend called “Angelic Yields” came to TikTok as the antithesis of the Devious Licks. Angelic Yield videos show TikTok users placing money, soap, coffee makers, and doormats (among other home-decor items) into bathroom stalls and near rows of sinks.
The Angelic Yield is seen as a much better alternative. Even though it is unclear whether all the Angelic Yield videos are featuring the kids decorating school bathrooms or just public restrooms, people are hypothesizing that school administrators and other staff would be happy to see students giving rather than taking.
Sophomore Makayla Williams would love to see this change.
“I would definitely rather have kids here doing the Angelic Yield and not Devious Lick. I’ve had to either wave my hands to dry them or wipe them all over my jacket instead of using paper towels because the dispensers look like they’ve been broken into,” Williams said.
Cody Castro // Staff Writer