Edited by Isabel Jagsaran
Parents get upset if you lose your jacket. But when one mom asked the question — why didn’t you put it in your locker? — the answer was, “We don’t have lockers.”
That’s right. At East Rock Community & Cultural Magnet School, students in grades 5 and 6 don’t have lockers. And it’s not because they don’t exist!
In the 5th and 6th grade hallway on the second floor, there is a row of grey metal lockers. Most are empty and have zip-ties that keep them from being opened. Our team of East Rock Record reporters counted. There are 220 lockers for students in grades 5-8 and, according to Assistant Principal Leslie DePriest and Principal Sabrina Breland, there are approximately 180 students in grades 5-8 who would require lockers, if they were all given one.
What’s going on? Some students say they want lockers.
Eighth grader Raven Ingram said lockers help her to be organized. A pro of lockers, she said, “is definitely not having things be messy.” She said it gives her “a feeling of being clean.”
When the East Rock Record reporters asked 8th grader Marlin Rodriguez whether or not there was a problem with lockers, she said “not at all.”
The question is: Are lockers really that great? Some students see disadvantages.
“One thing I don’t like,” said DeShaun Scurry, who is in 6th grade, is that “you have to keep on going back and forth to go to the locker.”
Aarav Singh Lemar, who is now in 7th grade, agreed and said that having a locker is “mostly good, except for when I forgot things.”
Some students often forget important items in their locker and then have to go back to the locker to get them.
Ms. Rodriguez, the 8th grader, does “think the hallway time of going to the lockers does disrupt the classes but I don’t think it’s fair for 7th and 8th to have the opportunity and for 5th and 6th to not.”
There is another problem: Student’s personal belongings are sometimes stolen out of lockers.
A 5th grader, Joseph Wise, who does not have a locker, says that he prefers “not having a locker because somebody got something of theirs stolen.”
Ms. Ingram, the 8th grader who likes an organized locker, disagreed. She said that she “has not encountered problems with her locker.” She added that, “people are worried about their own locker and don’t actually steal.”
Apart from stealing, Mr. Scurry, the 6th grader who does not like to go back and forth to a locker, worried that lockers could be a hiding place for contraband. But he also said that “some 5th and 6th graders are responsible enough to not bring bad things and hide them in their locker.”
The East Rock Record Fall/Winter 2025 Survey found that most students support lockers for 5th and 6th graders. According to the survey, 63 percent of students said that 5th and 6th graders should have lockers.
In addition, 71 percent said that it does not hurt learning for students to frequently go to their lockers. The data also reported an almost even split between students who believe it is best to carry their personal items with them throughout the day compared to those who do not.
Despite the fact that there seem to be enough lockers, the locker issue is more complicated than it appears. Ms. Breland said that a big reason why there are no lockers for the 5th and 6th graders right now is simply because the teachers have full control on this for their grade. Many of the teachers are split on whether they think the lockers are helpful.
Ms. Breland also told East Rock Record reporters that a current 3rd grade teacher and a previous 6th grade teacher said that they “stopped using lockers post COVID because of the fear of spreading germs.” And they never went back to using them.
But Nicole Raccio, a fifth grade teacher said that “COVID is not the reason we don’t use the lockers, it is because of behavior issues…If students behave well, we will gift them with lockers.” She was optimistic. “We may be able to have lockers in the future,” she said.
Teachers and staff are also grappling with whether or not to support the use of lockers. Monique Holloway, the school psychologist, believes that 5th and 6th graders should have lockers because “at that grade level, students need to start learning independence and organization skills,” she said. “Having a locker helps them build those skills.”
Sixth grade teacher Natalie O’Neill said that “some students would be very excited to have [lockers] because it gives them a little bit more independence.”
Lockers, however, come with problems, like classroom efficiency — and privacy.
Both teachers and students have varying opinions about factors like room cluttering from bags and coats and class promptness in particular. Amy Binkowski, a 3rd grade teacher, said that with lockers, the “classroom is less cluttered from backpacks and coats.” Yet as a former 6th grade teacher, she enjoyed, “not having lockers despite the backpacks and coats in the room.”
Deborah Mongillo, who teaches 7th and 8th grade, said that lockers are simply, “a place to put their backpacks, coats, if they have extra binders or notebooks. It serves as a hub for their things.”
Yet Ms. Mongillo does not mind not having lockers and instead just putting backpacks on the back of chairs. It even “might save time since students are going to lockers which can take away from classroom learning time,” she said.
Principal Breland does worry that lockers pose a distraction for students throughout the school day. “Students like to leave the class all day long and go to their lockers,” she said. Ms. Breland is also concerned that students “can conceal contraband in their lockers like extra phones and they can keep on going to their lockers during classes to check social media, play games, or tell their friends to meet them.”
Still, said Ms. Breland, “just because half of the students do this does not mean all the students should not have lockers.”
