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While some institutions are looking to close the door on lockers for student use, some suggest this could spell catastrophe for your child’s health. School lockers provide more than just useful storage solutions, they can also serve to protect multiple aspects of your child’s overall health and wellbeing.
According to Premier Lockers, a top school locker seller, lockers represent more than just a space to stow excess pencils and a book or two. They represent personal space and identity, something that can easily become lost in the tides of self-exploration and esteem construction that happen throughout the school experience.
As a parent, protecting your child is the number one priority. Some school systems are countering that lockers are outmoded. Possibly being used for weapons storage and other nefarious activities, pragmatist views beg to differ.
Lockers: Keeping Kids Safe
Despite the recent rumbling, particularly with the escalation in school yard violence, school lockers may serve to have the opposite effect. While weapons, such as guns, knives, or even bombs- can be kept in the lockers themselves, they are also just as easily concealed in backpacks and other personal items.
School lockers offer a haven that is not only individual to your child and their peers, but is also part of school property. Meaning that routine locker searches are perfectly legal and a way to safely and effectively check for any items that don’t belong in a school zone.
Lockers: Physical Protections
Backpacks, while fashionable and arguably useful, aren’t necessarily ergonomically designed. Specifically when they’re filled with the heavy volumes that are required for your child’s day to day education. Not to mention all of the less than feather-light electronic items that you kid packs with them every day.
Research suggests that the school backpack should weigh, at maximum, 10 per cent of the total body weight of your child. That means that your 50kg mini-me should only be toting around a total of 5kgs. Where most hardback scholastic tomes weight around 1 kg, but can be up to 3kg per book. This means that at most, your child should only have about 1-3 books in their backpack at one time. Discounting all of the other items students pack around all day.
School lockers offer a place for children to place these items and retrieve them only when needed. Lessening the weight of backpacks that can cause poor posture, muscle and skeletal pain, and even serve to negate balance- resulting in falls and other injuries.
Lockers: Organizational Skill Learning
School lockers can also help your child learn fundamental concepts, like time management, organizational skills, and responsibility for their belongings. Learning what to stow and what to grab, based on class schedule, will teach your child valuable time management skills. Differentiating between items that are necessary for what happens next, and what can be stored and picked up later.
Organization of school lockers goes hand in hand with time management and responsibility. Keeping a locker tidy can serve to give a student a greater feeling of accomplishment and individuality. Making it simple to grab and go, without a cascade of items falling out every time they open the door.
Making sure that a school locker is kept in good order can serve to protect delicate belongings like electronics or pictures of school mates. Making clear the importance of taking good care of one’s belongings. As well as the importance of a good organizational system where heavy books don’t lay on top of expensive and breakable tablets.
Lockers: Mental Health
Perhaps the greatest part of having a school locker, as a kid, was finally feeling like you had a space of your own. Allowing children to have their very own anchor in a world full of chaos can serve to boost esteem and creativity. Many children are encouraged to decorate their space in ways that showcase their individuality and creativity.
When many schools enforce a strict uniform policy, personal expression is often at a premium. Lockers can definitely offer young people a spot to really showcase who they are and to be proud of their own accomplishments. Helping to create a clearer sense of identity.
Lockers give students a sense of privacy, which can help reinforce abstract concepts like boundaries, respect, and value. Giving them a private space of their own teaches them to not only respect their own area, but also the importance of respecting others personal space.