Question about high school PE class

[Southern_girl29]

In my WIP, I'm thinking of having a scene where a minor character steals the MC's gym clothes. Do the lockers in the gym have locks on them? Do any of the lockers have locks on them now? Is this even plausible?

[Lyra Jean]

I graduated in 1998 from high school. We had locks on our gym lockers. Combination locks.

[Southern_girl29]

I graduated from high school in 1995, and we had them, too. I'm just wondering if extra security has changed all of that. I know here some of the students didn't even get to use their lockers. All of their stuff had to be carried in a backpack.

[P.H.Delarran]

My son has a a small locker to store his P.E. clothes in when not in class, and there is access to a larger locker he uses to store his backpack and day clothes while in P.E. class. He uses a combination lock, but somehow has had gym clothes and money stolen.

[Maprilynne]

Lock or not, there are easy ways to steal thing in gym. I mean, who remembers to lock their lock 100% of the time? Or look over someone's shoulder and steal their combo. There are tons of ways.

I have some stuff stolen out of a locker room too at one point. But I don't get into specifically how. I just say she stole it.

Maprilynne

[Grey Malkin]

It could more frustrating if the locker is broken into (by key or combination) and locked again - making the MC think the theif must be someone close to home, although that could screw up any mystery element.

[jnesvold]

I graduated from a small high school (57 graduates, and we were a large class) in 1993 and none of our lockers, gym or otherwise, had locks.

[Pagey's_Girl]

We had combo locks, but they were fairly easy to pop if you knew how - great for when you forgot the combo. I never had anything stolen out of mine, but I know it happened - there were many, many ways of being cruel to someone back then...

Edit - me and my friends all had the combos to each others' lockers, so yeah, someone could probably buddy up to some unsuspecting third party and get the combo...

[eric11210]

I taught in a public high school back in 2001 and as I recall, they do have locks on the lockers, but I could be wrong. I now teach exclusively in private school where they don't have locker rooms, so I can't tell you more than that.

Then again, if it's necessary to your story, maybe the character that steals the clothes managed to find out the combination somehow. Or knows how to pick locks or whatever. . .

Best of luck.

Eric

[Susan Flemming]

In my WIP, I'm thinking of having a scene where a minor character steals the MC's gym clothes. Do the lockers in the gym have locks on them? Do any of the lockers have locks on them now? Is this even plausible?

My son is in high school, so I just asked him and he says that while there are lockers, no one uses them. They just leave their bookbags in the change room and any valuables, ie cellphones, wallets, etc are given to the gym teacher for safe keeping in the gym office and are retrieved after class.

So while there are lockers that could be locked, it appears that no one uses them, at least not at his school.

[RumpleTumbler]

In high school we used to go out behind the gym and smoke weed during PE. I never saw the lockers or showers. I think there were some. The principal used to pull me out of class all the time and try to get me to play fooozeball so there must have been. The fooozeball games were on Friday night and my excuse to go out and liquor and weed it up on Friday night was that I was going to the fooozeball game. It didn't work out. Some might say I made the wrong choice.

[midwife]

My daughter is in high school and taking PE. They have lockers and combination locks, but stuff still gets stolen often....They share the lockers. Increased tension in your plot could be from your MC suspecting that her locker-mate either stole the stuff or left it unlocked.

[Elektra]

As Susan said, in our high school nobody used the lockers. Also, most of the time, people were in there for five minutes before and after class--so nobody was ever really alone enough to steal stuff.

[OverTheHills&FarAway]

We had to rent a lock, or bring our own. One person did. But the locker room was locked, go figure, during class, so not much chance of having anything stolen.

This was 2002.

[Shady Lane]

I'm in high school. You can bring in or rent a lock if you want, but otherwise the doors stay unlocked. Although my school is so small and safe that people mostly just leave their stuff lying around. What kind of school does your MC go to? Small, big? Rural, urban?

[Provrb1810meggy]

In my high school, everyone has locks, and everyone uses them, at least when they leave gym for their next class. They don't always keep their lockers locked during gym class, however.

[Croque Madame]

Our gym lockers had combination padlocks, but they were all really old and had been used so heavily that you didn't need to twirl the dial very precisely. For example, if your locker combo was 15 - 35 - 5, you could get it to open if you tried any of the following:

10 - 30 - 0
10 - 30 - 10
20 - 40 - 0
20 - 40 - 10

And so forth. If you picked someone's locker at random, you had a really good chance of managing to open it, if you had a few minutes to spare, especially if you had a vague idea of their combination by looking over their shoulder.

Theft from the gym lockers was a huge problem. I remember I got fed up and bought my own padlock, which I had to sneak in, because that was not permitted.

[weatherfield]

I went to a relatively large high school (2,500 kids). Security was pretty tight, but things still got stolen occasionally. The athletic department lockers didn't have built-in locks, so everyone was required to bring their own. I always had a combination lock, but some people would bring those brass MasterLocks that you need a key for. It sounds like, based on people's varying experiences, it wouldn't be too hard to invent a situation in which theft was plausible. I think the fact that you're considering a scene in which something of little value is taken makes it more plausible, because a lot of the effort that kids went to when I was in school seemed to be of a vendetta-ish nature when it came to stealing things.

[hnh]

We didn't have a lot of time to change after gym class, so a lot of the girls would enter in the first two numbers on their combination locks so that all they had to do when they came back was spin it to the last number and pop the lock open. Anyone could have come along and spun the dial until it popped open.

I had a broken locker in sixth grade. You could pull the door open even with the combination lock on. Someone stole my juice every day until I started carrying my lunch in my book bag.

[laurenem6]

Stuff got stolen from our gym locker rooms, but mostly because your backpack doesn't fit in the teeny little lockers they give you. They did have combination locks on them, but if your stuff's not in the locked part, it doesn't help much. And I graduated in 2004, if that helps.

Shady Lane, you're from MoCo? Me too! Although I can't really think of any small, safe schools there. :-P I went to Blake HS.

[Shady Lane]

Stuff got stolen from our gym locker rooms, but mostly because your backpack doesn't fit in the teeny little lockers they give you. They did have combination locks on them, but if your stuff's not in the locked part, it doesn't help much. And I graduated in 2004, if that helps.

Shady Lane, you're from MoCo? Me too! Although I can't really think of any small, safe schools there. :-P I went to Blake HS.

I have TONS of friends at Blake.

I go to Barrie. The little private school? Have you heard of it? It's on Layhill.

[laurenem6]

Aha, private school. I didn't think of that. Silly me :-)

[ebenstone]

High school teacher and football coach here....locks are provided, but its not too difficult to get into our lockers: smash through an adjoining unlocked locker and you've got pretty easy access.

[Southern_girl29]

Thanks everyone. I worked it out. My main character is a psychic, so she knew the kids were up to something. She wanted them to get in trouble (they torment her), so she left the locker unlocked to help them out a bit. She then told the PE coach about it, and the kids got in trouble.