By Avery Davis
Staff Writer
@avery2018

The typical image presented of a high school hallway includes rows upon rows of lockers. This may not be the case for long, as more high schools are removing their lockers in favor of additional walking space or furniture.

Coppell High School has recently been undergoing a series of renovations, including the construction of a new arena, renovation of the cafeteria and expansion of the field house.

While this construction involves many workers and time, its completion may switch the focus to other areas of the school. Some of this attention may be directed to the crowded hallways. Nearby schools are solving this problem by removing lockers in their hallways.

“You can see this especially in McKinney, Irving and Lewisville,” Coppell Middle School North Principal Amanda Ziaer said. “They don’t put lockers in new schools that are being built and many older schools are looking for ways to remove them.”

Coppell Middle School North has already taken out most of their lockers, replacing them with furniture, cubbies and iPad charging stations. The high school followed their lead over the summer, putting a variety of seating options, chairs and tables into the hallways for students to use during class.

“[The furniture] gives students a space to work where they can be effective,” International Baccalaureate English teacher Amy Wilkinson said. “They have a place where they can plug in, they can have laptops or iPads or whatever, so it makes it a lot more efficient for them.”

Like was the case at the CMS North, many of the students at Coppell High School prefer to carry around the materials they need for class rather than put it in their lockers.

“I never use my locker because it’s inconvenient,” sophomore Julianna Barraza said. “I’m trying to get to all of my classes on time so I don’t miss any information or be late and it takes too much time to go there and then get back to my classes.”

Although the minimal use of lockers is common, some students remain unaware of the high school’s efforts to remove the lockers this past summer.

“The furniture that you see in the hallways, the little red benches and those portable tables, in theory, are supposed to be embedded into areas where locker banks were removed,” CHS Principal Mike Jasso said.

At least one bank of lockers in C hall was removed this year. The plans to continue taking out lockers had to be discarded temporarily when problems arose with the structure of the school.

“They went to remove a set of locker banks from another hall other than C hall, only to find out that there’s a concrete support for those lockers that’s about 12 inches higher,” Jasso said. “That wasn’t foreseen…the concrete barriers, so to speak, created a problem.”

Since then, architects have found ways to work around these issues and plans remain in place to continue with hallway renovations in the future.