by Pam Ripling
Do you have lockers at your school? Not talking gym lockers. These are hallway lockers, with steel hinged doors and combination locks acting as temporary storage units for your books, snacks, quick face fixes and whatever else you bring to school but don’t want to lug around.
When I wrote LOCKER SHOCK!, a story about a middle school kid who finds something really terrible in his school locker, our local schools still had hundreds of these storage units on campus. But not long after the book came out, the lockers were removed. Yeah, just ripped out and thrown away! Students were issued a set of “home” textbooks, matching the ones that stayed in the classroom, so that they wouldn’t have to load up their back-breaking backpacks every day.
If you still have them at your school, you might be wondering why our district took them away. Well, it seems that it was costing a lot of money, because a lot of the lockers were damaged every year. Beaten, kicked, scratched, gummed up and soiled. They were infested with cockroaches, too, when kids left behind apple cores, Twinkies and near-empty soda cans.
Also, the school was spending money on “drug-sniffing dogs”—can you imagine? And worst of all… some districts actually found that lockers had become depositories for weapons. The cost of dealing with all these problems far outweighed the cost of the second set of textbooks for each student.
I loved having a locker. My dad built me a little shelf for mine, so I’d have two levels of storage. I had my mirror, and some stickers that actually made me smile when I stopped in between classes. I could stash notebooks, workbooks and my lunch there. Today, kids must drag all that stuff around with them.
What do you think about the locker issue? Should schools keep them, and find other ways to keep lockers safer and cleaner?
Pam Ripling is the author of middle-grade mystery, LOCKER SHOCK! Buy it at Quake, Fictionwise or Amazon today! E-book version now available for your Kindle! Visit Pam at www.BeaconStreetBooks.com.
Do you have lockers at your school? Not talking gym lockers. These are hallway lockers, with steel hinged doors and combination locks acting as temporary storage units for your books, snacks, quick face fixes and whatever else you bring to school but don’t want to lug around.
When I wrote LOCKER SHOCK!, a story about a middle school kid who finds something really terrible in his school locker, our local schools still had hundreds of these storage units on campus. But not long after the book came out, the lockers were removed. Yeah, just ripped out and thrown away! Students were issued a set of “home” textbooks, matching the ones that stayed in the classroom, so that they wouldn’t have to load up their back-breaking backpacks every day.If you still have them at your school, you might be wondering why our district took them away. Well, it seems that it was costing a lot of money, because a lot of the lockers were damaged every year. Beaten, kicked, scratched, gummed up and soiled. They were infested with cockroaches, too, when kids left behind apple cores, Twinkies and near-empty soda cans.
Also, the school was spending money on “drug-sniffing dogs”—can you imagine? And worst of all… some districts actually found that lockers had become depositories for weapons. The cost of dealing with all these problems far outweighed the cost of the second set of textbooks for each student.
I loved having a locker. My dad built me a little shelf for mine, so I’d have two levels of storage. I had my mirror, and some stickers that actually made me smile when I stopped in between classes. I could stash notebooks, workbooks and my lunch there. Today, kids must drag all that stuff around with them.
What do you think about the locker issue? Should schools keep them, and find other ways to keep lockers safer and cleaner?
Pam Ripling is the author of middle-grade mystery, LOCKER SHOCK! Buy it at Quake, Fictionwise or Amazon today! E-book version now available for your Kindle! Visit Pam at www.BeaconStreetBooks.com.
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