Are lockers necessary?

From the East Bay Times

It is a full five months into the school year, and Isabel Echavarria, a junior at Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School in Maryland, hasn’t used her locker once. She’s not even sure she has one. Sean Radley, a sophomore at Tesoro High in Las Flores in Southern California, thinks there may be one book in his locker, but he rarely visits it. Nekko Jones and Dwayne Burrell, freshmen at Cardozo Education Campus in Washington, were assigned lockers at the beginning of the year, but neither knows where his is.

Once the gravitational center of the high school day, lockers long ago lost their allure, and their usefulness seems a relic of an epoch of education that has slipped away. Movies and television shows about high schools may still feature students decorating lockers — or being shoved into them — but in the real world, lockers have all but been abandoned. The trend has expanded so rapidly and widely that schools are now removing individual student lockers from their hallways, and builders and designers for many new high schools don’t even include them in their plans.

“It’s a pretty big change that has taken place over the last few years,” said Sean Connor, a principal with Pfluger Architects, a large Texas firm that focuses on school construction. “It used to be the standard to provide individual lockers for every student. Now, the standard is no lockers or, at most, just a few.”

So, why the change? Anyone with a high schooler in their orbit knows that students now want everything they own with them all of the time. Books, phones, water bottles, headphones, laptops, tablets, snacks, coats, extra shoes. Where students used to swap out textbooks between classes, they now navigate the halls bent over by jam-packed backpacks like Himalayan Sherpas shuffling along without a base camp. This carry-all approach probably ensures a steady stream of patients for chiropractors, and it bewilders parents who don’t understand why their kids can’t just use an assigned locker to store their stuff.

For most students, the issue is time and convenience.

“My school is really big,” Echavarria said. “It has four floors and a basement, and stopping in one specific location between each class would be ridiculous. And it’s harder to keep track of your stuff if it’s in another location.”