District’s Plan to Remove Lockers Is One for the Books, Students Say : Schools: Officials say it will end a nuisance and stop loitering. Students say they won’t have a place to store books.

They are often mistreated: scarred and scraped, slammed and jammed, even scorched and torched. But try shutting the door on that campus institution--the high school locker--and just listen to the students howl.

Cries of protest echoed loudly among Antelope Valley high school students last week in the wake of a controversial school board decision to remove most of the lockers, nearly 7,800 in all, from the district’s three main high schools by this fall.

“I think it’s a terrible, an awful thing,” said Melina Filomia, a junior at Antelope Valley High School and assistant editor of the student newspaper there. “I have nine books,” she said. “I think that’s a little too many to be carrying around all day.”

And the fact that more and more school districts in Southern California are taking the same step did little to soften the blow.

“They’re asking me if it’s a good idea to protest, to start up a petition, to walk out of their classes. It’s real unorganized, but they’re real angry,” said Mitch Moore, a senior at Quartz Hill High School and the student representative on the district’s board of trustees.

The lockers may be a simple convenience to most students, and even a small piece of home away from home to some. But to officials in the Antelope Valley Union High School District, they’ve become an expensive and time-consuming nuisance that the district believes students can do without.

Wednesday night, the district’s board of trustees voted 3 to 2 to remove almost all of the lockers at the three schools, saving only 100 at each for handicapped or injured students. The board also decided to install only 100 lockers at each of two high schools now being built.

District officials said another motive for jettisoning lockers was to get students to class more promptly by removing the temptation to loiter. Eliminating lockers as a potential hiding place for drugs or weapons also was a factor, although school officials said they have not had many problems of that sort.

“In this day and age, with the amount of information to be learned, we just can’t waste time,” said Linda Janzen, the principal at Palmdale High School. She and other principals predicted their campuses will be cleaner, quieter and less burdened as a result of the change.

But a private psychologist who often counsels students--and even some of the district’s own advisers--warned that the removal of lockers also could cause emotional trauma. It sends students the message that they cannot be trusted and deprives them of their one private place at school, according to Lancaster psychologist Edward Reed.

Young people “have a need for some space that is privately theirs,” Reed said, comparing lockers at school to students’ bedrooms at home. “It really gives to these students a sense of security that is essential in terms of their development.”

And one high school district counselor, who refused to use her name because of the controversy over the locker policy, said she still often advises shy students to slip a note into the locker of a hoped-for friend, saying it can ease the socialization process and the youthful fear of rejection.

Among students, though, the dominant complaint was the prospect of having to lug around heavy piles of textbooks, folders, lunches, purses, jackets and other belongings all day, with no place to store them. Many said students will just stop bringing their books to classes.

“Everyone I talk about it with, they hate it,” said Tasha Petrovich, a sophomore at Antelope Valley High School. “I guess I’ll just have to start carrying a big ol’ backpack,” added her friend, sophomore Keshia Burleson.

The district’s school board last spring rejected a proposal to remove the lockers from the three schools, even with a plan to provide an extra set of major subject textbooks to be kept in the classrooms. That way, students could leave their own books at home.

But when the school board reversed itself last week on the locker policy, it also abandoned any firm commitment to provide the extra sets of books. Faced with cost estimates of up to $1 million for the books, school board members agreed only to consider the plan at budget time.

The result left students and even some teachers complaining that students’ studies could be hurt. Palmdale High School English teacher Carol Stanford said she favored removing the lockers, but added, “I think it’s ludicrous to do it without giving a second set of books.”

Several years ago, officials in both the Lancaster and Palmdale school districts--which feed into the high schools--removed the lockers from their four middle schools. Officials there said the switch has been a success, but they stressed that they provide classroom sets of textbooks.

Amanda Williams, a senior and the student body president at Palmdale High School, said she opposed the board’s decision in part because it will place the heaviest burden on the most academically active students, those who take more classes and carry more books.

Williams said she plans to ask the school board to reconsider its plan and instead relocate the lockers in central, secured locations at the schools. One of the district’s biggest complaints has been that the lockers are outside school buildings, making them easy prey for vandals and abuse.

“I think that’s a good compromise for both sides,” she said. “They said they were going to take the lockers out last year and they didn’t. So even now, I don’t see why they can’t change it back.”