VOICES
Student Lockers?
October 15, 2019
By Erika Alba, Qingfa Feng & Edenilson Garcia
The idea of having lockers for the students of Flushing International High School sounds exciting. However that idea is practically impossible, and the main reason?...Space. Many high schools in NYC have lockers for their students. Lockers are used by students to store their belongings, to avoid carrying books, bags, and jackets around the hallway.
Mr. Kevin Hesseltine, principal of Flushing International High School, and Ms. Radovich, principle of JHS189Q both said “what is needed to put lockers in our hallways is space.”
The school hallways are very hard to move around because of the space between the walls. Now if schools put lockers in the hallways it would make the space even more narrow which could be the cause of a fire hazard. It would also make even harder for students to get to their next class, since they have to walk through 30-40, or more students, and usually they push, or are being pushed by other students, and it is impossible to walk in a straight line.
However, this is not a surprise since the distance between the sidewalls is 274 cm. If the school put lockers for each student that means there would be at least 432 lockers for Flushing International High School students in the hallways. It’s already a problem when a couple of students stay in the middle of the hallways talking to their friends, now it would be even worse if we had lockers most of the students would make a little stop to pick up, or leave their stuff in their lockers in between class period breaks.
FIHS students, and teachers would like to have lockers in our school because they feel like It would make their school days “easier”. Some students from FIHS said having lockers have a lot of benefits, it can prevent students from carrying book bags to the cafeteria, and carrying extra things around the school. For example Migxi a formal 12th grader said, “It's very important to me because I keep very important things in my bag, and I don’t want to lose them, we can put the important things in the lockers, like wallets” Most of the students prefer to carry their bags instead of leaving it in a classroom because they are afraid of any of their personal things getting stolen or lost. Lockers are also beneficial for students that are athletes, they can use the lockers to keep an extra change of clothes. Just like Ryan another 12 grade student said “ it’s important because someone that plays sports like soccer/basketball ect, they can change their dirty clothes”.
Some teachers have discussed this matter of having lockers. For example, Min Hye a 12th grade chemistry teacher said “when I was in high school we had lockers for students, and I remember it was good because it made it easy for us to keep our stuff. Now I see my students carrying everything with them, and it makes me think about why lockers would be so important for our school.”
However going back to the question why don’t we have space? Mr. Kevin Hesseltine said “Originally this was a middle school, this building was not designed for lockers. Besides the school was only supposed to share building with middle school for a short time, because we were supposed to be moving to a new building, but that never happened” meaning the department of education was supposed to give Flushing International High School a new building obviously with more space. However, at the end, the middle school still shares the building with the high school because the “new building” was never given to our school. Since the building was not built for locker, Flushing International High School doesn’t have space for them.
In addition, another possible reason why the school does not have lockers could be money, According to DeBourgh of All American Lockers, approximately having a locker for each student, the school would spend a vast amount of money in total for 25 year,Which for sure the school would think twice before spending all that money on lockers. So there is no possibility for the Flushing International H.S. to have lockers for students anytime soon because of space limitation.
Sources:
https://www.debourgh.com/blog/breaking-down-the-cost-of-lockers/