Hi all,
Food, drink, and trash on and around practice room and to a lesser extent, ensemble and classroom pianos, is a vexing problem for us at UCLA as well.
I don't want to not address the issues of student responsibility and consequences; however, our strict rules posted in every practice room don't deter many students.
I think there are real life challenge reasons for that. We are bursting at the seams with a burgeoning music student population; we correspondingly have a chronic overcrowding and shortage of practice room resources. This pressures students to "stay with the room" once they have it, and because they must stay with the room and not leave it lest they lose it, they tend to bring in their lunches and Starbucks with them for the long haul. Should they be so lucky to find one open in the first place.
Add to that: because of staffing/maintenance cuts, our practice rooms are annoyingly and chronically dirty. Floors are filthy. I won't work underneath a piano "down in the" practice room "salt mines" without first throwing a towel or moving pad down first. So yeah, students aren't inclined to put their backpacks, instrument cases, and other personal items on the dirty floor, either.
I have thought about these issues for awhile, and what I'm come up with, especially for practice room, is that practice rooms need to be made more user friendly to begin with. Small shelves, hangup hooks, even an extra chair or even a small table (security cabled to the wall of course, so they don't "walk off"! so that students have a place to put their items rather than on the piano top.
Then, borrowing inspiration from this thread!! I'll place big reminder signs on each of the four walls of the practice rooms. And pray.