Backpacks are important throughout every single grade, and despite students being able to hide certain objects inside of them, it doesn't make it right for them to be banned. 

On December 6th, 2021, exactly at 11:31 am, a post by Lazar's principal, who will not be named, stated that the school wanted to "practice opening assigned lockers as many students are currently not using a locker." This is a perfectly fine practice for the school to do but the way it was executed was poor.

I believe that not only does the school want students to utilize their locker, but they also want to prevent objects to be hidden. The school stated that their policy is that phones and personal electronics (other than computers brought from home for schoolwork) must be placed inside the locker. I've seen many students disobey that rule. 

The school decides that the best idea is to get rid of these problems is to simply remove backpacks as a whole. On paper, this seems like a perfect idea, but in reality, the amount of weight that students are forced to carry is unrealistic. 

The way schedules are made is that you have 4 classes, (known as morning classes) then you have 5th period for lunch, which could also be used for a little break period, followed by another 4 periods, (known as afternoon classes). 

Each of these 4 periods is considered "halves", 1-4 being the first half and 6-9 being the second half. Period 5 is considered as the breaking point.

What the school wants the students to do is to carry all of their books for period 1 to 4, and then swap it out during lunch for 6 to 9.

The problem with this is that even though it is split out into 2 sections, the amount of weight that the students need to carry is unrealistic, going nearly over 5< lbs. 

Teachers poorly and briefly demonstrated how to open lockers, which made the situation even worse. If the students learned how to open their lockers on the first day they arrived, then possibly there would have been more people to use lockers.

Along with that, space is an issue at hand as well. Normally students would put all of their materials in the bag and keep it under their desk. This provides a neat solution so that your workspace is not cluttered. Now with bags gone, our narrow spaces for us to work on became, even more, smaller, creating a messy environment for students to work in. Some chairs have little holders under them for this type of situation, but most do not include this.

A more dangerous event that could occur is if a student trips and falls, not only is that a mess in the ground that must be cleaned up, as established in past Schoology posts, the best way to describe the hallway situation is a stampede. If a student drop's their materials, picking them up would be risky, not only that but the number of people that may be stepping on it, ruining notes inside, would be catastrophic.

You can see that the students in Lazar do not stand by this, and we hope to make a compromise with the faculty, to make an agreement that both sides support, signing this petition is our first way there.