'All gender restroom' signs coming to Yorkville School District 115 buildings

YORKVILLE – Signage for single occupancy bathrooms in Yorkville school buildings throughout the district is about to look a little different due to a new state law.

Heather DiVerde, facility operations director for Yorkville School District 115, said during a Monday, Feb. 10 operational excellence committee meeting that all single occupancy restrooms now must have an exterior sign that says "all gender restroom" instead of just "restroom." She said facility operations staff currently is looking at purchasing and installing the new signs.

DiVerde said users eventually will see signs that would include the male figure, a dividing line, then female figure captioned with "all gender restroom" underneath the figures. For the signs that already have those figures and just need to be captioned differently, she said, the district will just add a separate sign saying "all gender" underneath those existing signs.

"So we have to change out all single occupancy restrooms" in some way or another, DiVerde said.

The update comes after Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker signed the Equitable Restrooms Act into law in July 2019. The law went into effect Jan. 1. The law requires all public, single occupancy restrooms to be identified as "all-gender" restrooms.

The state law that recently went into effect defines a single occupancy restroom as a fully enclosed room with a locking mechanism controlled by the user that contains a sink, toilet stall and no more than one urinal. The law also said each single occupancy restroom shall be outfitted with exterior signage that does not indicate any specific gender and applies to "any existing or future places of public accommodation or public buildings," according to law text.

Yorkville School District 115 Superintendent Tim Shimp said during the meeting there are about 95 single occupancy bathrooms throughout the district. School officials sitting in the meeting clarified it also would make the single occupancy restrooms family bathrooms.

DiVerde said it's unclear at this time how much the sign changes will cost the district. She said facility operations staff is reviewing the numbers again after clarification of which signs would have to be completely replaced.

• This story will be updated as more information becomes available.