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A TikTok bathroom challenge that encouraged students to throw away the school bathroom in trash forced Terrace Middle School to remove the bathroom entrance door.

As part of the challenge called "Cunning Licking" that began on September 1, students documented themselves vandalizing and stealing items in school bathrooms and posted videos to TikTok.

Keith Axelson, principal of Caledonia High School, said that since the fall, staff have noticed a series of vandalism in multiple bathrooms in the building.

The students made school staff aware that these activities are part of the social media challenge.

The school’s solution to the problem was to remove the outer door of the bathroom. Axelson said that since then, there have been no reports of vandalism in the bathroom.

Janet Meyer, the district director of Coast Mountain School District 82, who oversees Caledonia Secondary, said that when the door was removed, the school made sure that no privacy was violated.

"At any time, we will not sacrifice a person's right to privacy, and if this affects the privacy of students, we will not shut the door out," Meyer said.

Meyer said that CMSD82 will not adopt a district-wide package approach on this issue. Instead, it will handle individual cases and ask school leaders to answer the phone if there are further problems.

Except for Caledonia, no school in the area has reported any such hoaxes.

The school also contacted the families of the students to let the parents know.

Meyer also said that after carefully reading the unofficial list of TikTok challenges (published every month), she found these trends "disturbing" because some of them are close to discrimination and harassment.

All the challenges listed in the coming months are destructive, such as vandalism, physical violence, theft, and sexual harassment.

For example, the challenge in October is to "beat the staff" and encourage students to walk up to the teacher and slap them and then run away.

So far, the school has not reported any other "challenges."

These challenges and lists were not published by TikTok. After no videos were found on TikTok, some of them were even considered "prank" challenges.

When asked, TikTok said they want their community to stay safe and create content responsibly.

"Content that promotes or contributes to dangerous challenges and illegal behavior is not allowed on our platform, and will be deleted," a TikTok spokesperson told Terrace Standard.

TikTok, like most social media platforms, now has review tools and features that allow content or accounts that violate community guidelines to be deleted.

The company said it also commissioned Praesidio Safeguarding, an independent agency, to better understand the involvement of young people in potentially harmful challenges and hoaxes.

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