NDB’s basement is filled with lockers, each of which is assigned to a student. However, is using them a good use of time and resources?
“I remember at the end of sophomore year when they told us to clean out our lockers and just never went back to it because I found that everything could fit in my backpack just fine,” said Senor Diandra Sahouria. “It wasn’t really convenient for me to go down all the way to the basement to get stuff from my locker and then go all the way back up.”
When students initially enroll as freshmen, many try to use their lockers since it is a new method of organization, whether it be for school books or sports equipment. Since many middle schools only provide desks for students to store their supplies, using lockers seems like a natural way to transition students to high school.
However, as time goes on and students become more adjusted to NDB, many stop using their lockers since it seems like a waste of time to make the trip to the basement every time they need something. Depending on what they use their lockers for, students can end up going down up to three times a day. This can become tiresome since there are alternatives to using this resource, such as carrying a backpack, which every student does anyways.
Most students opt to use their locker only to store sports bags that will be needed after school. This gives them a place to leave their stuff so it doesn’t need to be carried around all day, and only requires a stop at the locker room before school starts and after it ends.
NDB has also shown a lack of interest in using the lockers, as many are zip-tied shut in order to reduce the amount of trash that is stored in them when they are unused. Since there are very few students who use their lockers regularly, there has been discussion of the necessity of them.
Although using a locker can be beneficial for one’s health as it can relieve the stress on a person’s back, they are generally not a resource that students use since the time it takes to go to a locker can decrease the accessibility of them. Rushing down to your locker to get books during passing periods is more likely to make you late for class than if you were to carry your books with you. Instead, by storing extra bags in cars or the athletic locker room, students can minimize the number of bags they carry while not wasting time going to a locker room.
