Moving from middle to highschool, students tend to use lockers far less in their hallway transition. This, I feel, exponentially increases smoothness and efficiency for students who are moving from class to class. At the middle school, the hallways are divided up by grade level, whereas here they are divided by subject. This means there is a lot more running around to get to classes. There is no talk of this changing any time soon, and these are reasons why I believe that is a good thing.
Not having to clutter in the halls is beneficial for freshmen students that are just getting used to the layout of the hallways. With completely new factors such as a greater number of peers, teachers, and space in the school, freshmen already have a hard enough time as is. If everyone was stopping in the halls to get things out of the lockers, it would amplify stress and complex the hallway transitions even more.
Compared to Lylburn Downing and Maury River Middle School, the lockers at the highschool are much smaller. The size of the lockers makes it not even worth traveling to use them, as they can barely fit a few notebooks. In middle school, they were more useful because you could fit a valuable amount of things in them. When you can barely fit two full sized notebooks, the lockers become almost useless.
Students are given three minutes to pack up and walk to their next class. Adding in the stop at lockers would bring the need for more time between classes. Not counting having to travel into the Rockbridge Innovation Center, gym, health hallway, and cafeteria, there are already nine hallways that have lockers. Many students have classes that are dispersed all around the school, which means that they may be in a time crunch to get to their next class.
With 4 minutes between classes, I calculated how long it took me to get between Mr.Hardin’s Pre Calculus class and Ms.Paynes English class. Walking at a normal pace without traffic, it took me 3 minutes to get to class. Since teachers often expect students to use the restroom during class changes, I stopped where the bathrooms are for 45 seconds. After I got to class, I only had 1 extra minute till the bell rang. This proves that we would have virtually no time to use our lockers between class changes.
Their locker may be inconveniently outside of their daily route to classes, and they would have to go out of their way to use their locker. This taken into account, many students just don’t have the time to use their locker as they are risking being late to class. This, on top of the fact that the lockers are almost unusable, is why the hallways are better off without them.
If students are using lockers in between classes, there will overall be an increased number of physical cluttering. Students will be shoulder to shoulder with bags behind them and the open path in the hallway will be greatly narrowed. This too could cause people to be delayed when traveling to their next class, as well as an increased risk of irritability when students are constantly bumping into each other.
Overall, carrying our bookbags around instead of using the lockers is much more convenient because we have all of our needed materials on us throughout the whole day without having to make extra stops. The resumption of using lockers would just make day to day life in the hallways of RCHS even more of a headache than it already is to begin with, which is why it is best if things stay the way they are and have been since the pandemic.
