Crowding Around Lockers

ARE THE LOCKERS AT UNI-HIGH ANY GOOD?

Written By Eda Ozyurt

It’s a small nightmare going to your lockers. If you’re lucky, your class is nearby and you can make a mad dash to the lockers. When you get there,  the area will be empty and you will be able to obtain your items in relative peace.

Usually, you’re not lucky. You have to shuffle through the mass of people, hoping nobody accidentally knocks you over. If you get to your locker first, you better be quick, or the people whose lockers are on your column will be left waiting. If you’ve arrived a bit later, tough luck, you’ll either need to wait for the people in front of you, or try to weave around them  in order to use the locker at the same time. If you’re unlucky enough to even be around the microwaves, you’ll need to push through lines of people simply to go from one end of the space to the other.

The ordeal is uncomfortable, pushy-shovy nonsense and it ought to be better.

After conducting a survey, people generally felt that the lockers were way too crowded. The only dissenting opinion was from the person not using the lockers at all, instead opting to use their bag.

That presents a problem within itself.  It’s not good for students to carry heavy bags around school all day. As a Queensland Department of Education document states, carrying a heavy school bag can cause fatigue, muscle pain, back pain, distortion of the spine’s natural curves, and rounding of the shoulders. The bags can also present a fire risk in the classroom. Of course, lockers cannot prevent the carrying of heavy bags entirely, such as when one is entering and leaving school, but being useful reduces the time students carry their bags.

There doesn’t appear to be any real government policy guidelines towards lockers in particular. It’s simply assumed that schools will have appropriate locker space, and I can easily assume this because I can’t find anything directly about locker regulations in the Department of Education’s Policy and Advisory library. 

However,  I can find items in there which wouldn’t make sense without the assumption that lockers would exist in schools. For example, you can find a page detailing information about the mobile phone ban, which states, “Examples of secure storage [of mobile phones] include: student lockers that are lockable…”. 

There is a general assumption that schools will have lockers, which is entirely fair but also begs the question of why lockers are so terrible if they’re everywhere.

There is no real policy on the space locker rooms need and therefore, has been left up to common sense and matters of practicality. Unfortunately, in a growing school like ours, common sense cannot function and practicality becomes “however we can fit all these people in here.” Even during the depths of Covid, these spaces were uncomfortably crowded, let alone able to accommodate something like ‘1.5 meters apart’. 

We can spend as much money as we like on fixing up the South Building, and EBS, and on other future projects. However, if we place down lockers without thought, we will keep being miserable in these crowded spaces.

 In the future, when conducting renovations of the school, or when building new structures in the school, we must consider the placement of the lockers. We could have specific locker rooms, not concentrated in the hallways, or around non-locker items (such as microwaves, vending machines, et cetera) where people not needing to use lockers might want to access. That would unclog the hallways, and make it easier to access the lockers. Within the locker rooms themselves, we can prevent crowding by only using two-tiered lockers, not three-tiered, and by considering the placement of the lockers. With these strategies, we could minimize the problem of lockers.

But there’s this thought that sticks in my mind - in a post-pandemic world, and in a world where we’re constantly trying to innovate, it shocks me that we cannot find alternative solutions to locker spaces. The most consideration lockers seem to get when designing spaces are when they’re needed, and their consideration ends there. There is very little innovation in this field, it seems. Lockers are neglected creatures, so we really ought to do something about that.