Why Lockers?

         Lockers are used because they keep students’ belongings for school in a safe place where no one can get to it. Lockers also take off a lot of the heavy weight from students that suffer from multiple textbooks, journals, pencil boxes, and everything else that adds weight to your backpack. Although, after covid occurred, lockers were not available to students anymore. One reason given was that the district and the school did not want students to catch Covid by all crowding into one hallway, so they simply cut off lockers altogether. Although, this reason does not apply to 2022 because covid is no longer a huge issue going around. During an interview with the Principal, Mrs. Risse was asked when she thinks we will get the lockers back. Principal Risse replied, “At this time, our intention is for students to be able to manage their schedules, figure out what they need, and the teachers have been working with the students to minimize what they need to bring. So at this point, we are not going to be bringing lockers back. 

         Aside from this, in the interview, other questions were asked such as, “Do you think lockers are beneficial and/or important?” Principal Risse replied, “At this point, what I understood after talking to middle school teachers who have been here for years, is that lockers can be problematic. They can put things in there that are inappropriate. Kids often forget their locker combinations, they are late to class. They forget their materials in their locker so they have to leave class to go get them. When the lockers are all open, kids congregate, and then teachers can’t even see down the hallway to see what’s happening. So imagine after one of the periods, all 1300 kids are between 2 floors. That’s a lot of kids and a lot of chaos. There are so many reasons and because of all those reasons, many schools have gone away from lockers. In fact, only one school in the school district has lockers.” Another question that has been frequently asked is, “How many students are supposed to be at school?” When this question was presented to Principal Risse, she replied, “It was originally built for fewer students, though they’ve added on. There are around 1280-1300 students. We have enough classroom space for the amount of students, but we can’t have any more.” Lastly, an important question that all students should know about is why lockers were put into this school in the first place if we’re not using them? Principal Risse said, “I think they were there back in the day because kids carried books and they would have all of their classes in one day so you have 6 classes everyday and now you’re carrying maybe 5 textbooks everyday.” Lockers have been used for many reasons throughout the years. Although, as our school has looked more into it, there really is no reason for these lockers to be used now. This also has to do with everything being online, meaning fewer books to carry around. 

         The Spartan Scroll not only interviewed the principal, but interviewed students as well. 

         Talar, an 8th grader that has been going to this school for 2 years now, answered the question of, “What is your opinion on not having lockers this year?” Talar responded with, “I think lockers are useless because you know when you open your PE locker and you mess up so many times? I feel like it would make you late to class and we already carry around our books so I think it would be useless.” I asked this question to Karine, another 8th grader, and she responded with, “I think it is better to not have lockers because I don’t feel like walking to it every time in between class periods.” A second question asked was, “If you could bring lockers back, would you?” Talar responded, “No, I wouldn’t because my older sister went to CV and Clark and she had a locker in both places and she never used her locker in either high school. When she was in highschool, if she was going to English and her locker was near the science halls, she would have to walk a fairly long distance to get to her locker. So no, I wouldn’t bring lockers back.” Karine agreed with this, and responded, “No, because it takes too much time and people will fool around and stuff.” It seems as though people would not want more chaos to happen than there already is with packed hallways, staying to the left and right on staircases, etcetera. Along with these 8th graders, a 7th grader was also interviewed. The seventh grader, who chose to be anonymous, answered the first question by saying, “I think that lockers are useless and I have never used them before, therefore, that’s why I don’t think they are necessary.” Along with this, they answered the second question by saying, “No, I wouldn’t bring lockers back because now that Rosemont is making our backpacks lightweight, we don’t really need the lockers to put books into. And that’s a main point of the block schedule.” 

         In conclusion, lockers right now are not desired by students. Certain students may want a locker to keep things in, although it is not currently needed at the moment because of the block schedule that we have. We can leave our odd books that we need at home on even days, and leave even books at home when we have our odd days. Wednesdays are the only days that we have all 7 periods, although this is only one day out of the week. And on top of that, teachers are required to lighten the weight of your backpack by letting everyone keep their work for all of their classes in one binder.