Did you have lockers in elementary school?

43 comments

1. Never had lockers in my entire time in school

2. We did not have lockers in my elementary (K-6) school, just cubbies like you are describing in the back of the room. We did have lockers starting in middle school, though.

3. No. We had cubbies

4. Full lockers from kindergarten through 12th grade.

5. Not until middle school

6. I had a cubby from K-2, but no lockers from 3-5. We just had bookbags that we carried around at all the elementary schools I’ve been to.

   I don’t recall seeing lockers in shows or movies taken during elementary school though so not sure what that’s about.

7. Lockers in the hall just outside the classroom in elem and middle school. 3 banks of central lockers in high school.
   I think K and 1st grade, cubbies in the classroom so we didn’t have to remember a combination

8. We did in grades 5+ (age 10-11)

   I personally never used one.

9. We had lockers, but they didn’t actually lock/there wasn’t a lock on them. They were in the hallway, but the hallway directly outside of your room. They served the same function as cubbies in a room, though, because you weren’t moving from room to room/carrying a backpack, you just put your jacket and backpack in there.

   I think it was probably nice for the teachers that after lunch they didn’t have a stream of kids coming in the room to get their jackets/snow pants on for recess, and that all happened in the hallway. I think it might have been cubbies in the room for kindergarten though.

10. No. Kindergarten had cubbies in the back of the classroom and higher grades had you put your backpack at your desk or also had cubbies.

11. No locker until middle school in Maryland late 80s.

12. No. We had a large coat room with hooks for coats and backpacks, an area for musical instruments, and an area for muddy/wet/snow boots (mid Michigan can be sloppy when it’s not summer).

13. We had lockers at my elementary school, but they didn’t actually have locks on them.

14. No. That started in Middle School/Junior High for me. But I’m sure every school is different.

    We had ‘cubbies’, those shelves that are just open wooden boxes. That’s because our school and many others use a ‘homeroom’ method where students are grouped into one room as a home base area where most things like English and history are taught and then will occasionally leave for things like art and science because those rooms have all the tools in them for those subjects. But your homeroom is where your stuff is.

15. Yes. They didn’t have locks, though.

16. We stayed in 1 classroom so our books were either in our desks or on a shelf. Our backpacks went on the back of our chairs.

17. Lockers past kindergarten

18. No. And even in high school, no lockers at my school

19. * In kindergarten we had cubbies
    * In the rest of elementary school we had a coat closet along the back/side wall of the classroom and storage space in our desks (since we didn’t change classrooms).
    * In middle school we had the same style of coat closet in our homeroom that we’d access at the beginning and end of the day
    * High school was the only time we had normal, individual lockers

20. No, I didn’t have lockers until middle school.

21. 5th grade students got lockers at my elementary school, younger students did not. This was back in….’82-‘83, I think. Had to provide our own locks. Still remember that combination, too.

22. I never had a locker in elementary school, just a cubby in the classroom. I actually didn’t get a locker at all until late high school – my high school had around double the number of students it was built for, so lockers were only given to juniors and seniors, and two people had to share one.

23. My elementary school had lockers but it was a high school originally

24. No lockers until 6th grade (start of middle school, age 11/12)

25. Not until middle school and even then we didn’t have them because they had 600 lockers and 1200 students so they decided not to use the lockers. By the time I was in high school I was in dual enrollment program and so never got to use the lockers then either. I had to buy a pilot case in order to carry all my books without hurting my back. I’ve never had a locker.

26. I feel like I had a locker for my PE class in elementary school. But I could also be totally wrong. I definitely had a chubby. And had a locker in middle school though high school

27. I had lockers in middle school and high school, my kids have never had a locker their entire time in school.

28. I work in education and I don’t know of many schools at any level in my area that still use lockers. There is not much of a need for them outside of locker rooms for gym classes. Schools have been switching to Chromebooks/iPads and programs like Google Classroom for a few years and especially now after schools were forced to go virtual during Covid. It’s more cost effective to distribute and repair those devices than it is to make sure every student has a copy of each textbook.

29. Didn’t have lockers in elementary. Didn’t have them in middle school, and at my high school they’re optional and almost no one uses them

30. We had cubbies, not lockers. My daughter has a cubby but they have lockers at the middle school.

31. I went to elementary school from 1st to 4th grades. 5th and 6th were called intermediate school. We got our first lockers in 5th grade.

32. We had cubbies. Lockers became a thing in middle school.

33. I had a locker from 1st-8th grade.

    Where did you put your coat, snow pants, snow shoes, umbrella or backpack?

34. We had hooks for bookbags in the hall

35. In my elementary starting in 2nd grade. (But my homeroom had them, the other 2nd grade homeroom still had the coat room with hooks).

36. I went to a k-8 school, we did not have lockers, no cubbies either

37. My tiny K-12 school in Idaho had lockers for grades 1 and up.

38. Cubbies in Kindergarten. After that, lockers all the way. Hell, we even had inspections in 5th grade.

    I had an absolute demon of a teacher who’d raise holy hell if your locker was messy. I wasn’t the most organized 11 year old and got reamed a lot over it.

39. My kids’ elementary school has lockers for grades 1 and up.

40. No lockers in elementary school

41. Had lockers in my intermediate school for 5th grade. And then for middle school of 6-8th grade. Our new high school they built they saved money by not putting in lockers.

42. I had desks and hooks

43. I never had lockers. There weren’t any in my elementary. In middle school, we were banned from using them because kids had started fires in theirs. I went to a new high school not built with any lockers. Or solid walls between classrooms for that matter. It was awful. Only ever used em in gym class. Probably have back problems because of it.