Hear ye, hear ye!

Lockers are dead. It might be difficult to take this news, but it’s time to accept the obvious. The use of lockers has been on the decline across the country for at least the last decade.

Besides being a ubiquitous background image that is universally recognized as a school setting, there is absolutely no reason anymore for Akins to have thousands of lockers lining the hallways.

The demise of the high school locker follows the obsolescence of the high school textbook. Students at Akins rarely use textbooks in their classes with the primary exception being AP classes that are still dependent on these unwieldy and heavy burdens of knowledge. But students typically do not need to lock up these beefy books during the day leaving no reason to use a locker.

Coincidentally, the timing of the opening of the Akins campus in 2000 is around the time when textbook use across the country began to drop off as teachers began turning to online resources. The stagnant old textbook just cannot compete with the dynamic and up-to-date nature of the Internet.

I understand that there are sometimes cases when students might need a locker to secure some personal belongings, but we certainly do not need the thousands of lockers that line the red and green hallways. According to administrators only two students requested lockers this year — both for medical reasons.

With lockers and textbooks being so obsolete no one does anything about it except complain or point out the obvious “We don’t use the lockers or the textbooks.” Why is that? Do people like complaining about useless metal lockers on the walls and flimsy out of date textbooks and not doing anything about them? I know I don’t.

It’s time to remove the vast majority of the lockers from the school. I know it would cost a lot of money to take them down, but if we sell the steel for scrap, it might cover the removal cost.

With the lockers gone, there will be a lot of unused space that could be filled with display cases showing off certain features of different academies. This could help with recruitment for electives.

Or we could just do what administrators did in Albemarle County Public Schools in Virginia and replace the lockers with benches and charging stations for the electronic devices that have replaced the textbooks to begin with.

There are many solutions to this unused locker problem but it doesn’t seem like anyone cares enough to go through with anything. 2016 needs to be the year when problems are fixed and removing the lockers should be the first.