Lockers have long been a major icon of the American high school. But their popularity has declined to such an extreme that if you ask any student in the hallway where their locker is, they most likely won’t know where to start looking.
One of the scariest (but also one of the most exciting) parts of middle school was the lockers. Students spent countless hours practicing on combination locks in anticipation, and lots of lockers jammed before finally learning the best way to store supplies so that a binder wouldn’t get caught in the door. Lockers offered students a convenient place to put their bags, coats and valuables before going to class.
But for some reason, the locker frenzy that we all had in middle school no longer exists.
Now, seeing a student using a locker is remarkably rare. In fact, most students do not even know where their locker is located, much less its combination. Cindy Blakeley, director of Student Services, was able to provide some insight on the change.
“I think that the problem is that we stopped using lockers for awhile because we didn’t have enough, and then there was just a lot of upheaval when the whole renovation happened,” Blakeley said.
The idea of carrying around backpacks seemed to stick, even after the renovation started winding down. By that time there was little that the administration could do to encourage their use because, as Blakeley put it, “the whole culture changed.”
For example, freshman Mohit Sahgal said that he always uses his backpack rather than his locker.
As Saghal puts it, “It is more convenient [to use my backpack]. If I take my backpack I can carry all of my binders and all of the books that I need, but if I use my locker then I have to keep going back.”
In most television shows and movies about a high school, it’s not hard to find a scene set in front of a row of lockers or a clip of a character stopping by to pick up a textbook.
According to the LA Times, however, in the 1970’s lockers became symbols of a darker side of high school: students started using them to store alcohol and drugs, which led several school districts around the country to tear them out. More were demolished after the tragedy at Columbine High School, as administrators began to worry that lockers could be a good place to store bombs or deadly weapons.
In contrast, instead of demolishing or tearing out lockers, Marshall has recently added more of them as a part of the new renovation.
Sophomore Maya Chatterjee, however, believes that “lockers at this school are basically useless; nobody uses them,” and that “it is a waste of the school’s money to have lockers, and they should stop adding more in.”
However, for now, they are a part of this school, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
There are a lot of very good arguments for using lockers. Not having to carry heavy backpacks around all day takes a load off kids’ backs.
In fact, new research says the heavy bags that children and teens carry around all day are leading to chronic back pain and spinal disorders. According to Dr. Lonnie Zeltzer, director of the pediatric pain program at UCLA, backpacks “place a strain on certain muscles that causes kids to hold their bodies in certain ways and creates muscle and ligament pain.”
Lockers also offer security, and they can provide students their own space to keep their things. Blakeley thinks that lockers are important because students should be able to have “a place to keep [their] stuff and store things, and not have the burden of carrying all of it around, almost like having a home base.”
Not only does not having lockers increase the weight on students’ backs, having bulky bags in the classroom can be a inconvenience. Teachers in the science department have an issue with bags in the classroom, especially during labs. And other teachers find that bags reduce already-limited space, with many sharing classrooms this year. Either way, teachers can get frustrated with all the bags coming into the classroom, leaving less room for learning.
Additionally, students support for lockers can be found among athletes who have equipment and may find their lockers more useful.
“[My locker] has a lot of space for me to put my stuff before practice,” JV girls lacrosse member amd sophomore Eram Mallick said.
Student Services is doing all that it can do to motivate students to use lockers by giving freshman their locker assignments in the summer as a way to excite them, along with several other campaigns.
In response to the lack of locker usage, Blakeley says that “[students] don’t use them, and I don’t like that … and I feel sad that kids don’t use them, but if they don’t need it, and they don’t want it, I don’t think that I should force that on them.”
Out of 115 people interviewed during A Lunch on April 9th, 2015:
- 97 people don’t know, don’t care, and don’t use their locker (84%)
- 7 people know where their locker is and have used it (6%)
- 11 people know the general location (10%)