Word came down after the freshman orientation several days before the start of school: If you want a locker at , go buy a lock and slap it on. The locker becomes yours.
But by the time that information was conveyed to my newly minted freshman, any working locker already had a lock on it. Those upperclassmen are no dummies; they know from experience that their only chance at scoring a locker was getting in early.
Novato High has the largest enrollment of any high school in Marin. At 1,450 students, it dwarfs by 500 kids. Unlike the high school of my youth, lockers are not assigned to students. It’s a free-for-all. And, if you’re a freshman (or the parent of a freshman), it seems like a free-for-all-unless-you're-a-freshman.
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So there the kid is, like many of the kids in his freshman class, locker-less. But my kid has an edge. He’s got a cuckoo mother and a handy father. The Friday after school starts, said father and said kid wander down to the high school to find a broken locker that is salvageable. Saturday morning, said father heads to and purchases what he needs to repair the locker. They head to Novato High, fix the locker, slap the said kid’s lock on it, and go on their merry way.
It's been suggested that the best way to ensure access to a locker next year is to break the damn thing on the last day of school, thus ensuring said kid has a locker next year.
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I am not a quiet parent. (Have you noticed that yet?) I call and then e-mail an assistant principal about the locker-less lot of my loved one. When he calls Tuesday, I discuss the plight of said kid, and I opine how it’s ludicrous that lockers are unassigned, that it’s ridiculous that the number of students far outweigh the number of lockers, and that it’s plum nuts that the administration doesn’t at least assign lockers to freshmen.
He concurs on all points. And he notes that it’s the first time he’s heard the ingenious solution of fixing your own kid’s locker.
And he further suggests that I’d be best served by breaking not only my freshman’s locker at the end of the school year, but another one for the child currently in eighth grade.
Do you think the would turn me over to the police on that one?
