By Dimitra Sierros ’16

In the middle school, we use personal lockers to stow our belongings and keep our backpacks. Our lockers are located in the lower level of the middle school. They are incredibly inadequate, as they are too small to accommodate all of our academic materials. Placement can be a problem as well. “I think they are kind of annoying because they are either too high up, or too low down,” Says Bella Gibson-Luikart. However, we make do and we try to make them our own. Our lockers show who we are, representing the personality of each student. More outgoing students may cover the interior of their lockers with magnets and pictures; others may put up a single keepsake photograph or nothing at all.

A locker is also a learning experience. If a student’s locker is messy, his room, and, eventually, his car will likely follow suit. We should learn to maintain them. After all, our lockers are our own little sanctuaries. If we could, some of us would like to crawl into our lockers, shut our doors and escape from the world. Unfortunately, this is not an option for us.

As our community is quite diverse, the organization of each locker varies from student to student. We are split into two groups: the organized and the disorganized. Some of us have locker organizers, and some don’t. This is probably because, as mentioned above, our lockers are small, and seem to shrink as we grow older. We have a lot of books to carry around, and we need lockers that can handle all of our texts. Curiously, the middle school lockers are bigger than the high school lockers. However, upper schoolers don’t seem to have any problems with space management. Then there is the question of locks. While upper schoolers can lock their lockers, middle school policy says that we can not use locks. Several seventh grade girls had differing opinions regarding the lockers: “They [the lockers] work and all, but I think that there should be locks on them,” says Haley McCreary. However, the mandated lack of security is not entirely opposed. “[I like my locker], says Abbie Foster, “just because there aren’t any locks on it that you have to take on and off.”

We use separate lockers for athletic equipment, aside from the clean and well-maintained ones at the middle school. We have gym lockers too. Many middle schoolers do not like their gym lockers because they are rusty, small and impersonal. In the end, both lockers are a privilege, so we need to treat them with respect and keep them organized.