By Sally Rong, Staff Writer
With nearly 2100 lockers in Galileo and 1800 students, it should be easy to assign a locker to each student, but that’s not the case, since passing out lockers completely falls on the shoulders of Dean Cappels, who is responsible for all student lockers, as well as the system used to distribute lockers is all around inefficient.
Dean Cappels said, “I understand that there are inefficiencies [with the locker system], I’m frustrated but if kids are going to class, if kids are behaving peacefully and academically and I don’t have dean issues to work on. I will have time to go chop and open up some lockers.”
One of the main problems with locker distribution is the locker system isn’t up to date, as lots of the locker combinations have been lost. This requires Dean Cappels to have to manually go to each lockers and chop them one by one, which takes a while. After chopping out the locks, Mr.Cappels will then have to clean out the old lockers, some of which weren’t touched since 2010. After putting a new lock to the locker, the locker is then given to the first person on the waiting list.
The manual labor of distributing lockers on by one causes a backlog of issues that has eventually affected students themselves. With some students having to wait for months with no locker in sight, some would share it with their friends. Some would take matters into their own hands and claim a locker without a lock as their own which creates a whole other level of issues.
As of now, the current wait list for a locker has 70-75 students waiting for a locker. With one students having to wait over a month and a half and still hasn’t received one as of now.
One system that could completely solve all these issues, according to Mr.Cappels is already in Synergy. In Synergy, there’s a function called lockers. And if the school is allowed to use this function, it automatically assigns unopened lockers to new students, and automatically removes lockers from graduated students or students who left the school. So every time a student’s schedule is printed, it will also have a locker for them and the combination for it automatically. The Synergy system would involve Mr.Cappels spending time working on it before the school year starts, but it would be worth it because it would allow all incoming freshmens to get the lockers before they even show up.
However, he still doesn’t have this function yet despite Mr.Cappels asking for it for over a year and a half. Mr.Cappels believes though that the school district is facing a lot of challenges right now so they don’t see one’s school’s locker situation as a priority.
Similar to the school district, Dean Cappels has a lot to handle and lockers are not at the top of his priority list. He said, “Unfortunately as dean, I’m paying attention to kids that are disrupting class, kids who are wandering the halls, fights on and off campus and so the job of being a dean has to take priority over the position of locker opener.”
