It’s a bit of an open secret that the gym locker rooms are one of the least secure places for belongings in the school, short of putting the Hope Diamond on a cafeteria table with a sign saying “Steal Me.” The school’s policy for ameliorating the situation is to say that all gym lockers should be locked.

That would be a fair proposition if the lockers actually worked. But they don’t. Unless you are on a sports team, most of the lockers are too small to accommodate the backpacks that many students carry to P.E., and those that are big enough to be used are either locked or so beat up that they do not even open.

Unless the school manages to get the funding to replace the lockers (unlikely), it will need to find another way to make sure that students’ property does not get stolen. And that can be solved by pointing out a few obvious truths.

1.) Whoever is stealing students’ possessions is doing so in the middle of class.

If the thief (thieves) was stealing between classes, he/she would have been caught by students cycling through the locker rooms by late September. It’s January now. Therefore, it is fairly likely that the thief/thieves is cutting class. Solution: crack down on class-cutting. Not only will this improve the effectiveness of our education, but it will also lead to a drop in theft in the locker rooms.

2.) Whoever is stealing students’ possessions is doing so by entering the locker room.

Unless the school has ghosts and/or ninjas, the locker thief/thieves is/are entering through one of the doors into the locker room. And that happens to be one of the few places in the school that is not monitored by a CCTV system. I’m not talking about putting cameras inside the room, but at the entrances. This way, if (when) someone enters the locker room in the middle of a class, with or without stolen items, it will be a simple matter to catch the offender.

With just a few cleverly placed cameras, we can reduce the theft problem to an almost non-issue. It’s a no-brainer.