Students Say Locker Size Is Cramping Their Style

Nationwide, school lockers range from one to two feet wide and deep and five to six feet high, said Scott Howard, a sales manager with locker seller Cisco-Eagle Inc. in Dallas.

"There are four, five major locker manufacturers in the country, and they've all been making them for a million years, and they really haven't changed," he said.

Dimensions are ultimately dictated by space. There's not enough hallway in the typical school to fit 1,000 lockers wider than about a foot apiece, Song said.

Locker dimensions vary in the region. Prince George's County uses a variety of sizes. In Loudoun County, lockers are a foot shorter than those in Montgomery. Schools in Fairfax and Arlington counties are moving from taller, thinner lockers to shorter, fatter ones that can hold larger book bags and puffier coats. In Fairfax, new lockers are 15 inches wide and 36 inches high; in Arlington, new lockers are 15 inches wide and 30 inches high.

"We have found that width seems to be more desirable than height," said Paul Regnier, a Fairfax schools spokesman.

Henry David Thoreau Middle School in Vienna, built in 1960, has narrow lockers built to the old standard. Students with neighboring lockers learn to take turns in opening them.

"They're kind of old and small," said Courtney Vereide, 12, a seventh-grader. But classmates "don't talk about them much," she said, "except when they get jammed."

Whatever the shortcomings of lockers, principals also fault the tenants. Middle school students, they say, are especially prone to treat a locker much as a Southern Californian would a car: as a second home.

"We've found leather jackets, brand-new tennis shoes, Christmas presents in June, crusty brownie pans, fuzzy, moldy lunches, you name it," said Carole Goodman, a longtime middle school administrator who is now principal of Blake High School in Silver Spring. "To me, it's a management issue."

William Schmidt, a professor at Michigan State University, blames textbooks. He is an expert on the size and weight of American school texts. "Worldwide, we have the biggest textbooks that exist in mathematics and science," he said. Middle school books often top 700 pages, he said, because publishers attempt to include all the material taught in several of the largest states.

"We are so far off the scale, in terms of what we expect our kids to lug around."