FALL RIVER - Thirteen-hundred boys. One bathroom.
Those are the odds facing the male population of BMC Durfee High School after every class and during every lunch period.

But as they say, if you've got to go, you've go to go. And so the school's only boys' bathroom is regularly jam-packed, filled wall-to-wall with boys waiting in line for the 10 urinals and three toilets.

“It's kind of crazy,” said Sophomore Craig Martin, who added that there are long lines “almost all the time after lunch.”

To make matters worse, boys who are trying to get around the school's no-smoking policy retreat to the already crowded room to light up. After every period, the smoke clouds the bathroom, and wafts out into the hallway beyond.

Invariably, the smoke alarm goes off. More than 25 boys come tumbling out like clowns from a car, trying to get away before teachers rush in to corral the smokers.

Martin, like many other students, is fed up. He warned a friend entering the bathroom that the smoke cloud was “really bad today.”

“There should be teachers in there all the time,” he said. “Now, [teachers] just walk in and people put the cigarettes down and pick them back up again.”

And if long lines and clouds of smoke weren't enough to make you hold it in for one more period, just being in the bathroom makes some students fear for their safety.

“Some people don't want to go in there because they're afraid they'll get beat up,” said freshman Diego Cunha — who was quick to note that the bathroom didn't scare him.

Students are also quick to note that the boys' room is a good six-minute walk from some far-flung classrooms in outer branches of the mammoth building.

Add that to the regularly clogged toilets, and the lack of soap, paper towels, toilet paper, and even doors on the three toilet stalls, and the scene in the boys' room brings to mind an old-time prison, not a modern high school.

It's not quite so bad for the other half of Durfee's students, however — the girls are lucky in comparison to their male counterparts: there are two open bathrooms for a female population of approximately 1,500.

It wasn't always this way at Durfee. In fact, principal Fernand Letendre estimates that the school has more than 20 bathrooms for boys and girls. But most of those are filled with boxes, locked up and used as storerooms.

Director of Buildings and Grounds Dan Rapoza said that school officials have tried to open up additional bathrooms, but that they were unsupervised and quickly ruined by groups of destructive students.

“When we opened two or three of them, they destroyed them,” he said. “We keep putting doors and all that up, and they get ripped down.”

So they close the bathrooms, with the exception of the solitary restroom by the principal's office. But eventually state workers show up to do inspections, and the cycle begins again.

“Then the Health Department comes in, and you've got to open [the bathrooms],” he said. “I don't have an answer.”

Now, many outside the walls of Durfee are taking notice.

Several students and parents have organized a group known as Parents Rallying for Improvement of Durfee's Environment, or PRIDE, decrying the “intolerable bathroom conditions.”

And in the past few weeks, Mayor Edward M. Lambert Jr. and several other School Committee members have taken tours of the building, with an eye to correcting the situation.

“I went into the bathroom myself and almost gagged on the smoke,” Lambert said.

The School Committee this week issued a decree that Principal Letendre find some way to address the bathroom situation, whether that means opening one or two new bathrooms and using adult monitors all day, or opening many bathrooms between class periods and at lunch.

“They want me to come up with a plan. But the plan's going to cost something,” Letendre said.

“My responsibility is not only that the bathrooms are open, but that they're clean, they're safe. But I can't spend my whole day in the bathroom. I need the help of all of the adults in this building,” Letendre said.

There are technically two other open student bathrooms at Durfee, a boys' room and a girls' room each adjoining the gym, but they are for use only by students in gym class.

The facilities at Durfee, long maligned by Fall River residents, have been a problem for so long that even the School Committee's patience is wearing thin.

“We're very tired of that school, or that building, being an issue,” said Lambert, chairman of the School Committee. “I'm not trying to be a jerk about this, but 15 years ago I was on the School Committee, and we discussed what to do about the bathrooms at Durfee High School.

“It's a difficult building. It should have been a shopping mall and not a high school,” he said.