Clarke Central High School students are without lockers this year due to logistical issues and lack of use. “It’s not like you saw students stopping up and down this hallway everyday opening up 15 or 16 lockers at once,” Associate Principal Martha Yuran said.
By VIOLET MERRITT – Staff Writer
Due to under-use and renovations, Clarke Central High School students face the advantages and disadvantages of not having lockers this year.
Clarke Central High School students were not assigned lockers for the 2014-15 school year due to the limited access of the campus that construction has brought. Although this is not the first year that CCHS has not used lockers, the cause is unique.
“We knew students were going to be in all different locations of our building,” Associate Principal Martha Yuran said. “And you’ve seen things one day are fine and then there’s construction happening.”
With different locations of the CCHS campus undergoing modifications, Yuran says that a continually changing campus was not the ideal place for assigned lockers.
Yuran also says that students had little use for lockers when they were available.
“Most of the students that I’d interacted with didn’t typically use their locker in between class changes,” Yuran said. “It’s not like you saw students stopping up and down this hallway everyday opening up 15 or 16 lockers at once.”
Freshman Daniel Palomino, however, says that being assigned a locker at CCHS would have been beneficial.
“I wouldn’t have to take everything to class and always be disorganized,” Palomino said. “(When I had a locker) I didn’t have to carry all of my stuff to one place and another.”
“I didn’t use (my locker) because I don’t feel like we have long enough transitions and I didn’t want to be late to my classes.”
— LAURYN WATERS,
sophomore
Freshman Leah Orlando says that a locker would have been useful to store heavy materials, like her Personal Learning Device and her sports equipment.
“My backpack’s a lot heavier with the PLD,” Orlando said. “So I could have put my clothes for volleyball in my locker.”
Some students who had assigned lockers in years past did not use them.
“It would take too long to go there between classes,” junior Simone Zaccaria-Jeffers said.
Sophomore Lauryn Waters said that she had a locker last year, but like Zaccaria-Jeffers, she rarely used it.
“I didn’t use (my locker) because I don’t feel like we have long enough transitions and I didn’t want to be late to my classes,” Waters said.
Though she did not frequently use a locker last year, Waters says that this year it would have been different.
“I wish I would’ve had it this year because teachers have been more understanding so I feel like I would have had time,” Waters said.
Despite the effects that the loss of lockers have had on students, Yuran says that lockers were not appropriate for the circumstances this year.
“It just wasn’t very logistically feasible to assign and have access for everybody to have lockers this year,” Yuran said.
