Parent life / The school locker’s quieter years
The locker is still waiting
It has a shelf, a hook and a great deal of emotional support from parents. The student has a backpack.
Camille Miner was a freshman at Andover High School, a public school in Massachusetts, and she had a locker. In October 2018 she told the school paper she had never tried to find it. The building was big, her classes were spread out, and carrying binders there and back was too much trouble.
I feel for the locker. I like to think it spent the summer preparing for a relationship. Books. Perhaps a coat. A small interior decorating scheme. As of that October, nobody had come to the door.
Parents tend to love the locker more than anyone else does. It is such a manageable little room. You can picture the mirror, the photograph, the shelf that promises to keep papers from becoming a geological formation. On a school tour, a parent can stand admiring the sturdy door and pricing a magnetic pencil cup, while the child a few steps ahead works out how far that door is from the next classroom. One of them is furnishing a headquarters. The other is counting the extra stop.
Maja Vukovic, a sophomore at Grayslake Central High School in Illinois, gave the student paper the arithmetic in December 2025. Her locker was across the school, and passing time was five minutes.
A locker on the far side of the building is a fine place to keep things, provided you have time for the trip. In five minutes, the backpack, which goes where you go, starts to look like the sensible filing cabinet. Buying the shelf does not produce the habit. Sometimes you have simply bought a shelf, and the habit has gone off to science with both straps on.
Cameron Harris, a sophomore at Granville Central High School in North Carolina, did get a locker. WUNC reported in 2017 that she had grown frustrated carrying her cheerleading and band equipment around, so she asked her mother to bring her things to school at the end of the day. Her mother's answer was, "How about you just get a locker?" Cameron did.
When she opened it for the reporter, it was empty. She hadn't had much that day, she explained, just her bag and her shoes, and she had left those in her classroom.
A locker suggestion sounds different coming from a parent holding a pencil cup on a tour than it does once you are the one tired of carrying everything.
Empty or not, the locker was there, with its shelf and its hook. It is a patient piece of furniture. It has had practice.