A couple key quotes from a WaPo piece on Schools and Lockers:

Once the gravitational center of the high school day, lockers long ago lost their allure, and their usefulness seems a relic of an epoch of education that has slipped away. Movies and television shows about high schools may still feature students decorating lockers -- or being shoved into them -- but in the real world, lockers have all but been abandoned. The trend has expanded so rapidly and widely that schools are now removing individual student lockers from their hallways, and builders and designers for many new high schools don't even include them in their plans.

Anyone with a high schooler in their orbit knows that students now want everything they own with them all of the time. Books, phones, water bottles, headphones, laptops, tablets, snacks, coats, extra shoes. Where students used to swap out textbooks between classes, they now navigate the halls bent over by jam-packed backpacks like Himalayan Sherpas shuffling along without a base camp. This carryall approach probably ensures a steady stream of patients for chiropractors, and it bewilders parents who don't understand why their kids can't just use an assigned locker to store their stuff.

"The high school experience has evolved where learning is anytime, anyplace," said Ann Bonitatibus, principal at Thomas Jefferson High School in Fairfax County, where most of the school's individual lockers were removed during a renovation last year. "The more that our campuses are like that, the more inclined our students are to have their materials with them at all times and all places so that way they're learning at lunch, at 20-minute break periods or between classes."

Thomas Jeffson High School in Fairfax is a magnet school for science and tech, so it is not implausible that "moles and trolls" martyrdom chic has over-run the campus -- i.e. students signal their nerdcore perseverance and struggle through the real burden of a bag full of books, the fuller the better.

In the other schools, is the work load so high that historically available moments of respite have been captured by the curriculum?