A Locker Sign-Up Sheet With Eight Names on It

A man at a lunch table for a week with a clipboard and almost no customers. I have run a lemonade stand with the youngest. I know that look.

One sophomore did sign up. She had been carrying her cheerleading and band equipment around all day and asked her mother to bring it to school at the end of the day instead. Her mother's answer, as the station reported it: "How about you just get a locker?" So she got one. When she opened it for the reporter, it was empty. She had left her bag and her shoes in her classroom that day.

It is not only North Carolina. In October 2018, the student paper at Andover High School, a public school in Massachusetts, reported that almost no freshmen had looked for their lockers, even after getting combination locks. One freshman said she had never tried to find hers. The building is very big, she said, and her classes are spread out. The school nurses worried about backpacks, and recommended rolling ones.

And in December 2025, at Grayslake Central High School in Illinois, a sophomore told the student paper: "My locker is across the entire school, I wouldn't make it to class in time." Passing time is five minutes.

I still know my high school locker combination. I do not know my own license plate.

When the eldest started high school I asked her where her locker was. She said she had one. I asked where. She said, "Somewhere." She carries everything, all day, in a backpack that weighs, by my estimate, as much as the youngest.

Last week she asked if I would bring her soccer bag to school at the end of the day. I said, "How about you just get a locker?" She looked at me as if I had suggested a fax machine, then said she'd ask her friend's mom.