I used to wonder about locker stuffings because where I live in California every locker I’ve ever encountered is about a square foot, except for PE lockers and even they are too small to stuff a person into. Then I realized that in places where it snows the lockers might need to be big enough to hold a big winter coat without dripping all over your textbooks. I still don’t know if I’m right about that or not.
It depends very much on the school, but lockers in older schools especially tended to be floor-to-head height. School boards cut their budgets, many smaller schools closed and more students were crammed into larger ones. My own high school was built for a capacity of 1000 max, but was 1450 students by the time I graduated. They’d built 8 “portable classrooms” in the field behind the school (I’ve driven by since; there’s 12 now). Old tall lockers were removed and double-stacked ones replaced them. Not really room in their for boots and a long coat, now, but the idea was just to have enough lockers for the number of students in an overstuffed school. I can easily imagine some or all of them have been replaced with three-high or four-high stacks since; that’s be getting close to your square-foot size.
We often didn’t have room in the smaller lockers for all our textbooks, PLUS our outdoor wear, PLUS a bag with gym clothes and shoes, so the only solution a lot of students found was to get larger, college-style backpacks that can hold most of their textbooks, and carried them ALL around with us all day. That’s an unreasonable amount of weight. We had kids developing back problems while still in their teens!
How come all the important decisions that so impacted our lives back then, were made in board meetings by people who never set foot into the damned school? So many terrible ideas that looked good on paper, but were disasters in their execution.
Im Sowwy…
I used to wonder about locker stuffings because where I live in California every locker I’ve ever encountered is about a square foot, except for PE lockers and even they are too small to stuff a person into. Then I realized that in places where it snows the lockers might need to be big enough to hold a big winter coat without dripping all over your textbooks. I still don’t know if I’m right about that or not.
It depends very much on the school, but lockers in older schools especially tended to be floor-to-head height. School boards cut their budgets, many smaller schools closed and more students were crammed into larger ones. My own high school was built for a capacity of 1000 max, but was 1450 students by the time I graduated. They’d built 8 “portable classrooms” in the field behind the school (I’ve driven by since; there’s 12 now). Old tall lockers were removed and double-stacked ones replaced them. Not really room in their for boots and a long coat, now, but the idea was just to have enough lockers for the number of students in an overstuffed school. I can easily imagine some or all of them have been replaced with three-high or four-high stacks since; that’s be getting close to your square-foot size.
We often didn’t have room in the smaller lockers for all our textbooks, PLUS our outdoor wear, PLUS a bag with gym clothes and shoes, so the only solution a lot of students found was to get larger, college-style backpacks that can hold most of their textbooks, and carried them ALL around with us all day. That’s an unreasonable amount of weight. We had kids developing back problems while still in their teens!
How come all the important decisions that so impacted our lives back then, were made in board meetings by people who never set foot into the damned school? So many terrible ideas that looked good on paper, but were disasters in their execution.