With the coming of the new school year, the upper school students were greeted with a surprise upon receiving their locker assignments. Unlike years past, where lockers had been separated by grade, the lockers of the freshman, sophomore, and junior classes were mixed together. However, the traditional senior hallway was persevered.

Upon hearing this news, the general reaction from the student body was one of confusion and disgust. Sophomore Julian Mathews initially felt that the change was unwelcome. “I thought it was unnecessary and would just end up being annoying to the students,” he said. His sentiments were similar to those of many others who were being faced with this new situation. Many students ended up turning to social media such as Snapchat to vent about their frustrations. The usual flood of locker number assignments found on student Snap stories were often times also accompanied by rants lamenting the woes of having to share locker areas with students from other grades. Of course, not everyone was upset with the new locker arrangements. According to senior Helen Hundertmark, the locker integration was a welcome change. While as a senior, the changes did not directly affect her, she noted that “[it would seem] the administration changed the lockers so that the grades intermingle more, and I think it’s nice that the school is working to make the entire high school community stronger and not just focusing on connection within the individual grade levels.”

At first glance, the mixed lockers seemed to be a useless inconvenience, but Dean Crane was quick to affirm that the change did indeed have a purpose similar to what Hundertmark described and was not just a scheme concocted by the administration to make the student body’s lives more difficult. When asked about the motivation behind the integration, she responded,

“Many students benefit from developing friendships across grade levels, and I was hearing from a number of students last year that they wish to make friends with students who are either not in their classes or in their grade. I asked students from each grade how they would feel if we mixed up [the lockers of the grades] and they seemed pretty excited about it! At the same time, I noticed that lockers grouped together by grade level tended to encourage students to stay within a certain area of the hallway. The added bonus to this idea would that be that it could perhaps keep noise levels down as well.”

As school began to start up again in full swing, the locker situation faded in the minds of many of the students, becoming a distant frustration rather than an imminent issue. Despite his hesitation when the change was first announced, Matthews eventually conceded, saying, “this really didn’t turn out to affect my high school life, since in the end it’s very easy to just go and find people.”

A closer inspection of the new locker policy shows that there was most certainly a benevolent intent behind the decision. The only question which remains is whether or not the mixing of lockers was successful in its original goal of greater integration among students. For the most part, it appears that rather than socializing with students outside of their own grade level, friends who were separated by this new development simply took to finding new locations to hang out. In this way, the locker organization was successful in reaching the lesser of its two goals: reducing the volume in hallways. The hallways are no longer a convenient choice for a place to meet up, so they are far less noisy.

Overall, the new locker setup was an interesting development which accompanied the new school year. It was a change that seemed more dramatic at first than it actually ended up being, and while it may not have done much to integrate the grades further, it did serve part of its purpose.