Taking back the right to backpacks

It’s tough being a high-school student in Canada in 2026.

Some of them entered high school in the shadow of COVID-19, where the typical norms of secondary education radically changed out of necessity. Post-pandemic, the very-online, social-media-driven world of teens has been overrun with liars, grifters, scammers and extortion artists.

Not only do you have to take care not to snap and share intimate photos of yourself, lest they break containment onto the wider internet, you now have to wonder if someone will take your more innocuous photos and use them to generate sexually explicit material with an AI chatbot.

And then, for some reason, your school decides you shouldn’t be allowed to carry your backpack around with you to class, even though you may have been doing it for years.

This last point is one students at Sturgeon Heights Collegiate in Winnipeg know well. Last week, the school issued a mandate that backpacks must be kept in lockers. That rule had relaxed in the time of COVID-19, when the school stopped the use of lockers in the name of keeping people moving through the halls, rather than lingering where the virus might easily spread.

Now, long after its student population has grown accustomed to the post-pandemic way of doing things, the school has chosen to reverse course.

“In the subsequent years since the (pandemic-era) practice was put in place, students have once again been assigned lockers, but school administrators are finding that not all students are utilizing their lockers as intended,” reads a statement from Principal George Valentim. “While we appreciate student concerns regarding locker use, our efforts are geared towards creating a safe, organized and distraction-free learning environment.”

Valentim’s statement noted teachers have raised the issue of “tripping and slipping hazards,” as backpacks block walkways in classrooms.

It seems like thin reasoning.

This practice has been in place at the school for years. If the tripping hazard had been a chronic issue, one hopes it would have been addressed by now. If it has only recently become an issue, it’s a simple matter of correcting students on proper storage, placing the bags under their desks or over their chair backs (or, as one student suggested while speaking to the Free Press, lining them up at the back of the classroom).

The situation has provoked something of an argument between students and administrators, each with their own points. There is also disagreement over whether students have sufficient time to get from one class, to their locker, to the next class.

One letter writer noted that, at least in some cases, keeping kids flowing briskly from one class to the next is preferable, as unsupervised areas such as lockers can be ripe locations for bullying.

However, labouring over these points only makes the entire situation more frustrating, because the simple fact is, there was no real reason for the school to do this.

An entitlement, once granted, is difficult to take away. While administrators may not see it as such, it is nevertheless an entitlement granted to the students that they can take their backpacks with them from class to class. It is also a relatively new norm — though not one we can strictly attribute to the pandemic — for students to have water bottles with them in class, something not afforded to previous generations. Times change.

If there is an issue of proper storage once the students and the bags are in class, it is one which can be easily worked out between teachers and pupils.

Banning the bags outright with no warning accomplished nothing but engender hard feelings between educators and learners.

When one takes a wrong turn, the best thing one can do is reverse course.