Designing Smarter Restrooms for Better Learning Environments

Aside from classrooms, few spaces in a school have as much day-to-day impact as its restrooms.

A restroom that feels dirty can affect how students experience their environment. A plumbing failure can interrupt the school day. And fixtures that waste water, require frequent repairs, or are difficult to use can create ongoing challenges for facility teams.

That puts a lot of responsibility on restroom design. Sloan’s Education Markets page brings together solutions for hygiene, hydration, sustainability, durability, accessibility, and operational efficiency across elementary schools, high schools, and higher education facilities.

Here’s a closer look at four challenges Sloan can help you address when designing your next education facility.

Cleanliness and Hygiene

Handwashing is one of the simplest ways to help keep students healthy. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) states that up to 80% of infections are spread through hand contact.¹

Restrooms are also a major cleanliness concern for families. In a 2026 survey, 50% of U.S. parents said student bathrooms were the area of their child’s school that concerned them most from a cleanliness perspective—ahead of cafeterias at 34% and classrooms at 25%.²

Restroom design can help address both concerns by reducing touchpoints and making handwashing simpler for students and staff.

• Touch-free Sloan products such as faucets, soap dispensers, hand dryers, and flushometers help reduce contact with frequently touched surfaces.
• SloanTec^® Hydrophobic Glaze helps inhibit the growth of germs and bacteria on water closets and urinals.
• BASYS^® Guided Handwashing Faucets provide an on-demand, touch-free experience designed to support hygiene while conserving water.
• Accessible Sloan sink solutions include open-front and two-height configurations to make handwashing easier for users with a range of mobility needs.

Durability and Maintenance

When school plumbing fails, the impact can reach far beyond the restroom. 70% of public school districts experienced isolated plumbing issues or leaks during the 2024–25 school year, while 13% experienced chronic plumbing problems.³

Those problems can even disrupt learning. Nearly one in five districts canceled school because of a facility issue, affecting an estimated 2 million students and resulting in about 3.5 million lost days of learning.³

This makes durability, vandal resistance, and maintenance important considerations when specifying school restrooms. Sloan offers products and technologies designed to withstand heavy use while helping facility teams spend less time responding to problems.

• SloanStone^® Solid Surface Sinks provide durable surfaces designed for demanding school environments.
• The Sloan Connect^™ App gives maintenance teams visibility into water usage and device health, helping keep products operational with less downtime.
• Vandal-resistant and anti-graffiti mirrors help protect restroom surfaces against intentional and accidental damage.
• Sloan Track-on^™ installs easily on existing top-spud flushometers and alerts facility teams that a run-on condition is detected before it leads to excessive utility costs or flooding.

Safe, Accessible Hydration

Clean drinking water is another important part of a healthy school environment. Sloan’s DropSpot^™ Bottle Fillers and Water Coolers give students and staff convenient access to cleaner water while supporting accessibility.

DropSpot water coolers can be equipped with filtration that reduces lead, total PFAS, microplastics, cysts, particulates, chlorine and other contaminants. Their antimicrobial push bars and bubblers help reduce the risk of germ transmission and are designed for easier cleaning and sanitization. Plus, ADA-compliant DropSpot configurations support accessible hydration, with optional cane aprons to accommodate people who use visual-aid long canes.

Sustainability and Water Savings

When 55% of public school districts consider their most recent facilities budget insufficient to meet their needs, water conservation isn’t just a sustainability goal.³ Every gallon of water a school avoids using can help reduce costs.

Across high-use restrooms serving hundreds or thousands of students and staff every day, those savings can add up over the life of the facility. Sloan offers a wide range of technologies designed to conserve water.

• WaterSense^®-certified faucets and flushometers reduce water consumption without sacrificing performance.
• High-efficiency and waterfree urinals help schools save thousands of gallons of water annually.
• Royal^® Reclaimed Flushometers are engineered to withstand the harsh conditions reclaimed water presents and help facilities conserve potable water supplies.
• Solar- and turbine-powered faucets can reduce dependence on disposable batteries.

School restrooms may not be classrooms, but the specification decisions you make can have a surprisingly large influence on student wellness, facility reliability, accessibility, and operating costs. Our Education Markets page offers more ideas, products, and design resources to help architects, designers, engineers, and facility teams create restrooms and hydration spaces ready for the demands of modern education.

For more ideas and solutions for your next education project, contact Sloan!

1—Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, "Show Me the Science – How to Wash Your Hands"
2—American Cleaning Institute, “2026 Back-to-School Survey,” 2026
3—U.S. Government Accountability Office, “K-12 Education: Facility Issues Led About One in Five Districts to Cancel School in 2024–25, Affecting 2 Million Students,” 2026.