In early 2010, former students Alex Coelho and Charlie Platt posted messages threatening the school on Facebook. The two were arrested on Jan. 5, 2010, after a parent who read the exchanges passed the information onto the school.
The school officials reported the threat to the Brookline Police Department, who then requested a locker search. However, the school failed to comply promptly because it had no knowledge of which lockers the students were using.
Now in 2012, the school is tightening the locker policy.
“The issue is about knowing who’s using what lockers in the rare occurrence there’s some kind of emergency and we need to know who’s using which locker,” Dean Diane Lande said. “It’s a big concern if it ever comes up.”
Under the new locker policy, students are each assigned to one of the lockers that are situated based on grade level. Students must use the locker unless there are extenuating circumstances, said Dean Adrian Mims. This is a sharp contrast to the past years when the use of an assigned locker was not strictly enforced by the administration.
The school has also been zip-tying unassigned lockers in order to prevent stolen items, weapons or drugs from being hidden in those unoccupied lockers. If students do not secure their locker with a lock, their locker will also be zip-tied.
Mims stresses that the purpose of this new policy is to protect the students.
“It’s a security and safety issue, simply because over the past few years we’ve had problems with lockers that weren’t secure,” Mims said. “It’s all about students’ safety.”
Sophomore Suzanna Jack said she likes that the policy discourages people from taking lockers but isn’t sure it will work.
“People really like having two lockers and will find a way to work around the policy,” Jack said.
Junior Alex Beau pointed out a problem with locking up unused lockers.
“I know on the fourth floor or on the third floor, my friends’ lockers were all closed off,” Beau said. “They were all very angry about it because they didn’t have fair warning about the area being closed off.”
Junior Molly O’Neill said she recognizes the importance of safety but also finds fault in the new policy for not giving students the option of choosing which locker to use.
“It’s probably safer, but you don’t have a choice anymore,” O’Neill said.
Mims, however, said that the locker policy is meant to reduce available places to store dangerous items.
“Anything you do when you have over eighteen hundred students,” Mims said, in response to students’ discontent, “you don’t please everyone.”
