School Lockers Are Making a Comeback

The school locker, long feared as a repository of drugs and weapons, is making a comeback.

Some administrators are returning the metal boxes to campus, figuring it's better than creating a generation of students with back problems.

In one Orange County school district, a board member who watched a student wobble and fall over from the weight of her backpack has proposed reinstalling lockers in middle schools.

Fifty miles away, after receiving relentless complaints from parents and students, officials in the Pasadena Unified School District have begun unsealing lockers that had been shuttered since the 1970s.

"There was this perception that each locker was a den of iniquity," said Bill Bibbiani, director of research and testing for Pasadena Unified. "But there are better ways to handle problems than to treat each locker as if [it's] a hole-in-the-wall gang hide-out."

For decades, the locker--stuffed full of books, sports equipment and love notes--was the quintessential symbol of the American high school.

Then, in the late 1970s, it began to be seen in a sinister light. Potentially teeming with drugs and knives and covered with graffiti, lockers were torn from high schools and middle schools across the country and students were forced to haul their books on their backs.

After the Columbine High School massacre in Colorado, officials feared that bombs also could be placed in lockers, and many schools that still had them couldn't rip them out fast enough.

But then some administrators realized that backpacks could be just as dangerous--and not just because students were staggering under their weight. Charles "Andy" Williams, charged in last spring's shooting at Santana High School in Santee that left two students dead and 13 wounded, allegedly hid his gun in one. That's why some schools now require students to carry see-through mesh backpacks.

Now, after much lobbying from parents and at great expense, lockers are back in vogue. No one keeps statistics on how many schools have placed orders--or even on how many ripped them out in the first place--but locker manufacturers nationwide report that business is booming, particularly in California, Arizona and the Gulf Coast area of Texas and Louisiana, where administrators were particularly fierce in eradicating them.

Across the country, new schools no longer are being constructed without lockers, said Harry Popolow, senior product manager for Penco Products, one of the nation's largest locker manufacturers.