If I Won the Lottery...

...the first thing I would do would be to buy new lockers for The School.

I am so not kidding here.  And I am not alone.  Mrs. Eagle and I both discussed this on our road trip before school started, and we decided one of the things we absolutely hate the most is Dealing With the Locker Drama.

Our building is 45 years old.  The lockers in my part of the building are, as far as anyone can tell, the original lockers that were put in at some point after The School opened.  And the kicker?  They weren't new at the time.  They were removed from another school and put in our school when the other school got new lockers.  (Got that?  Yeah, confusing.  What I'm wondering is why we never get our lockers upgraded).

What this means is that these lockers are a royal pain to open.  Many of them are broken and beyond repair.  Many of the locks are hard to turn, with numbers that are difficult to see.  They're dinged, dented, they stick, the handles break off, they are a nightmare.

And, due to the number of kids on our team this year (even more than last year), we are running out of workable lockers to assign.  So today, the second day the kids had their lockers, we were dealing with kids having all sorts of fits trying to get their lockers opened and getting their things out so they could get to class (I'm not even worried about tardies at this point.)

I have one student, Wimpy Girl who is absolutely devastated that she might have to carry more than one book at a time.  (They are, she says, heavy.  She is, to be nice, not tiny.)  That's the beginning of the drama.  She went through three lockers today before we finally found one she could open.  Each time she had a problem she burst into tears and just about lost it there in the hallway.   Mrs. Social Studies and I spent most of our hall duty showing kids (including Wimpy Girl) how you turn to the right, stop, turn to the left and pass the first number (they have trouble with this) and stop at the second number, and then turn to the right to the third number.   I had Wimpy Girl spend most of afternoon homeroom practicing on her third locker until she could open it without trouble - or tears.

And she wasn't the only one.

I can't help but thing how much easier life would be if we had lockers that worked - my kids are dreaming of lockers with fingerprint sensors so all they had to do was touch their hand on the locker and it would magically spring open - not a bad idea, truth be told.

But I have a feeling, I'll be retired before we ever see new lockers.