ATLANTA — School districts across the country and here in metro Atlanta are warning students about participating in a new TikTok challenge.
“The Bathroom Challenge” or “The Devious Lick Challenge” has gained popularity on TikTok and involves damaging restrooms or stealing school supplies.
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Atlanta Public Schools said the challenge recently happened at Midtown High School in the boys’ restrooms.
The school said students destroyed soap and paper dispensers, sinks, hand dryers and other things. The students also intentionally flooded the restrooms. Graffiti is also shown in the videos.
“The amount of money and staff time expended to continually repair and replace fixtures and repaint walls and scrape tile is greater than I have ever seen in my 24 years of being a principal,” Dr. Betsy Bockman said in a letter to families. “Our school, and district, maintenance teams should not have to spend hours and money repairing damage from our students.”
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Lassiter High School principal Dr. Chris Richie also warned against students participating in the challenges.
“Social media challenges encouraging students to steal items from our school or vandalize our school are not funny. We asked students to make sure they were utilizing social media appropriately. We reminded them that posting a threat or negative comment is hurtful and can even be against the law,” Richie wrote.
Jones County High School in Gray, Georgia, posted a message on Facebook telling students and their parents the consequences if they are caught taking part in what the high school called “theft of government property.”
Channel 2 Action News reached out to TikTok and a spokesperson responded with a statement.
“We expect our community to stay safe and create responsibly, and we do not allow content that promotes or enables criminal activities. We are removing this content and redirecting hashtags and search results to our Community Guidelines to discourage such behavior.”
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