After school began, full-time lockers suddenly disappeared. Many students wondered the reason for this. I decided to write a piece about why lockers should come back, and for part of this piece, I was going to talk to Ms. Mac about the reasoning behind it. But when I spoke to her, she was able to change my mind about the matter, and maybe she can change your mind too. So here's why lockers are no longer available in the middle school today.
Initially, we were told lockers were gone because we needed to distance ourselves socially during the pandemic. But times have changed since then, so why are they still gone? It wasn't just one big reason that led to the loss of lockers. Multiple parts made this decision happen. But why have me explain this to you rather than Ms. Mac herself? Here's what she had to say when I talked to her:
“So it was a number of small steps that happened, firstly we went through the stage with COVID, and for a while there, we had to be six feet apart, and so when you try to spread out the lockers far enough for that to happen, we didn't have enough lockers for them to be spaced that far out. Then after that had happened were looking at the lockers, and we were struggling with some storage situations because we had to spread out all the furniture, and so we were looking at that as well. And one of the big things that we had decided was lockers are kind of part of an older generation of learning where you had to have big thick textbooks for every class you took. And that's why they had lockers because often high schoolers would need to have big thick textbooks and binders and that sort of thing. And we don't have those anymore, so we don't have the same reasons for why lockers were used since now we don't use textbooks, and we don't expect you to carry them. I used to have like eight textbooks, and they were heavy. So the need for lockers is not there anymore.”
Ms. Mac believes that the idea of lockers is better than the actual thing. One reason is that she says they can cause problems with students' behavior. I can see this happen since lockers cause more people to group up, and we can see how that causes problems with places like the Jalsa and the HOP. She also said that lockers were removed not only from the middle school but also from the high school due to the same reason. I asked a few students anonymously about how they felt about the matter; one student said, "I never really used lockers so I haven't really felt the need for them." A few of them thought it would be nice to have them, but not if it caused issues.
She also addressed the ‘rentable’ lockers on the first floor, saying, “And after we took the lockers away, there was some feedback, and some families reasonably so said that some children had activities after school, so we needed an option for them. So that's when we started doing the day lockers. So that people who have extra stuff have space to keep it on days like those.”
As technology advances, we can see that lockers aren't completely necessary in our new learning system. In the end, not having lockers is more of a minor inconvenience compared to all the other reasons they had to remove them. So while it is disappointing not to have lockers, you should know about all the thought that went behind the decision and simply live without them.
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