The case of the vanishing lockers

In losing lockers, kids may be losing out on something they one day might have treasured.

Originally published in the Moultrie News.

I read recently in the Charleston Post and Courier that lockers on high school campuses are no longer being installed. Kids now have to carry everything with them. Is this good, or do lockers serve an important function?

In losing lockers, kids are likely losing out on memories and relationships they one day might have treasured. In the end, however, they’ll be fine because they’ll never know what they missed.

The article you reference highlights the basic reasons schools no longer install lockers. The most common explanation is that kids don’t need them anymore. Textbooks are generally available online, and notes can be kept digitally, so kids don’t have to lug around multiple heavy books and a massive binder anymore. They just need a laptop.

Whether that’s good or not has nothing to do with lockers. I agree with the research showing that kids learn better from textbooks than from digital material, but that ship has sailed. The reality is that books are out and computers are in, which is a key reason lockers are no longer required.

There are two other critical reasons for the change. The first is cost. In building new schools, every dollar is a decision. Lockers cost a lot of money to install, and wiping them off the books leaves more funding for things administrators would prefer having, like fancy furniture or state-of-the-art weight rooms.

The second is size. High schools are getting bigger. Forbes says that though the best high schools have traditionally enrolled 400-500 students, today’s average is about 850. That’s twice the ideal number, but a mere half of the typical suburban high school.

If you ever tour one of today’s cavernous, shopping mall-esque suburban high schools, you’ll immediately see the problem with lockers: kids don’t have time to travel from the science wing to art class with a locker stop in between. The distance is just too far. Factor in the hordes of students clogging the hallways, and lockers are simply untenable. I know some high school students who still have access to lockers, but they can’t use them for this reason.

So what are kids missing as a result of this change? Missouri Western State University professor Kipton D. Smilie, quoted in the Post and Courier article, hits the nail on the head: socialization. “This is a social space that’s disappearing,” he states, noting that lockers allow kids to negotiate with people they don’t know or are uncomfortable talking with. “That locker placement kind of forces those interactions, and now without that, now you can kind of go more to your bubble than maybe in the past.”

Those bubbles are proving to be troublesome for kids. The lack of in-person socialization is a clear factor in the rise of depression and anxiety. Most adults probably remember turning their lockers into “me” spaces, decorating them in ways that represented their identities, like a bedroom away from home. You met friends at them, slipped notes in them, and even shared them with close peers. Though many schools are turning to alternatives like personalized painted parking spaces, the me-spaces for today’s students are mostly found on digital platforms like Snapchat and TikTok. Negotiating the strange, pseudo-social relationships sustained by those apps is doing kids no developmental favors.

I still remember a number of locker-instigated relationships and romances with students I otherwise wouldn’t have known. One of my best friends in high school became one of my best friends because we shared a locker. As Smilie notes, while administrators typically think of lockers as simple containers for school supplies, “they also serve as containers of a shared social space that is currently disappearing.”

I doubt the vanishing locker trend will ever be reversed, nor could it without reversing a lot of other factors. But it will be okay. In the grand scheme of things, losing lockers is probably the smallest of casualties in a world prancing away from traditional socialization. More worrisome is the aggregate impact of the myriad other casualties that are marking this generation as one of the most outwardly privileged and inwardly tormented in American history.

Read the original column here.