School District Puts Burden on the Students : Lockers may be on the way out, forcing pupils to lug supplies from class to class. At one campus, the costly alternative is to buy a second set of textbooks.

My 15-year-old daughter has a bad back which I am convinced she got from two years of carrying a 40-pound backpack around Pacoima Middle School. It doesn’t have lockers.

Well, it has lockers, but the kids can’t use them. Fortunately, my daughter has now gone on to a high school where lockers are permitted.

I tried to get the lockers reinstated when she attended the Pacoima magnet school. I proposed a locker art project in which students would have created their own designs to get a vested interest in keeping the locker privilege. The idea was met with a multi-page list of painting regulations, proposed inspections, required approvals and a room full of administrators shaking their heads. Weeks later, metal bars were placed across the lockers to reinforce the locker lockout.

I learned that Pacoima was not alone when my son entered the Performing Arts Magnet at Millikan Middle School in September. Lockers there are being phased out. The only students who have them are ninth-graders, who will leave in June. Lockers are being given the boot by the school’s Shared Leadership Council, composed mainly of teachers.

A representative of the Shared Leadership Council explained the policy at an advisory meeting of magnet school parents. Up went half a dozen 16-by-20 sheets of poster board setting forth the council’s position, and up went the ire of 40 parents.

When students have lockers, we were told, all sorts of terrible things happen. They become noisy, late to class and irresponsible. They store contraband, not to mention moldy sandwiches and dirty socks. They damage the lockers. They give their combinations to classmates.

Principal Pete Ferrie told me later that he personally supports locker ownership as a way to instill self-discipline. At South Gate Middle School, his former school, a movement to get rid of lockers failed. But he arrived at Millikan with the phase-out in progress.

Eventually, my sixth-grader will not actually have to haul all his books around. The Shared Leadership Council has decided (pay attention now) that the school will buy enough books so each student will have a set--and so will each classroom.

No wonder we don’t have money for field trips, repairs, a full-time nurse or a school psychologist. The cost of the books is about $50,000 for the whole school.

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The Shared Leadership Council said one reason to close lockers was that it costs a lot to fix them. A lot? Compared to what?

In the Yellow Pages I found a business that repairs lockers. The stated costs were $34 to replace a door, $8 to replace a handle and $8 to replace a lock. I walked around the school and found about 100 lockers needing repairs. At the maximum of $50 per locker, that’s $5,000. You could fix all the broken lockers 10 times for what the new books will cost.

I called a few other schools. Mulholland Middle School has lockers. Principal Alfredo Tarin agrees that it’s cheaper to fix them than to buy double sets of books. They don’t cause tardiness, and he thinks it’s easier to slip contraband from one backpack to another than from one locker to another.

Tarin also thinks lockers help to instill self-discipline. “If students are not allowed to gain responsibility through their actions, they will never attain it,” he says. Student leaders handle problems, referring information to custodians and administrators when necessary.

Portola Middle School has lockers too, though there are some teachers who Principal Richard Cord says would like to see them go. He says he thinks students need to know the rules early and not give their combinations away.

“We tell them it’s like giving someone your house key,” he says. “Young students are very trusting. A simple, ‘You can stash your stuff in my locker,’ can lead to a combination being known several weeks later throughout the school.”

He says lockers are the center of social life in a middle school, and though they can lead to tardiness, there are other ways to discourage that problem.

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I say even if lockers are sometimes a problem, so what? Kids are messy and noisy and test the patience of adults. Young people learn by testing their environment, even if it’s uncomfortable for the adults who watch over them and who were once just as troublesome. Many people want children to behave like neat and tidy and quiet and obedient automatons. But kids forced to be quiet are not going to be as productive, creative or valuable to society.

I don’t like the death of lockers, and the process isn’t going particularly well. The new books aren’t bought yet, so my sixth-grader is lugging his backpack from class to class. Magnet coordinator Joe Cash, who weighs about 170 pounds, carried a backpack during one day to see what it was like and agreed it was too much for him. He likes lockers, but he’s in the minority on the Shared Leadership Council.

The Shared Leadership Council, the district’s vehicle for site-based management, decides this sort of thing. But principals told me it’s clear that Downtown thinks lockers should be on the way out. A sign of this attitude is that although there is administration money for redundant textbooks, there is none for fixing lockers. A special fund could be tapped, but that would take action by, you guessed it, the Shared Leadership Council.

I’m beginning to get the picture.