Pack Rat

There are NO BACKPACKS allowed in my classroom. This is something I explain to students and their parents from day one. I write it out, send it home, and have kids and their folks sign off on it every year. And every year, it makes all the students grumpy and some of the parents angry. I forewarn the front office, and I set time aside to conference about this classroom policy. Invariably by the second week of school it is no longer issue.

The origins of my anti-backpack policy started as a grass-roots campaign. During the first years I worked as a teacher I was also the parent of several school aged children. We had back pack issues in our house. The boys in particular were infamous for losing homework, gaining other pals’ toys and secreting trash in the pack that qualified as hazardous waste. I would do a weekly purge of crumpled papers, broken pencils and pens, misc. school supplies, stinky socks and petrified food stuffs (a hot dog from Tuesday? GROSS!). Something had to give, and it was my patience.

So, starting at home, I began my STAMP OUT BACK PACKS agenda. I sent notes to teachers, asking for a lighter load to be instituted. I went to the school and voiced my complaint against back packs to administrators. I confiscated my children’s packs, and replaced them with plastic grocery bags. All of these actions disenfranchised me from the school staff, and mortified my own kids. Plus, nothing changed. The books were still assigned as daily homework, my children still stuffed and mangled and misplaced what they were given and the bags tore or broke, necessitating rides from me to and from school, because the messy, heavy loads made walking too difficult. The backpacks were redistributed at home, and I increased my backpack cleansing ritual from weekly to daily. This helped quite a bit, and my kids became lighter packers and more conscience carriers. Except for my youngest son, who continues to be a most industrious and committed, as well as beloved, pack rat.

When I first began teaching at a middle school in Arizona. I watched a daily parade of students hunched over like a Sherpa, bearing the weight of their packs as they trudged across campus. I took to weighing some of their packs, and found a few that topped 30 pounds. I called in a friend, a chiropractor by trade, who gave a presentation on the potential harm and injury hauling such loads could befall a young skeletal system. There was exactly no change in the student body after receiving this information. They seemed to take some perverse pride in competing with one another as to who could manage schlepping the biggest load.

Over the next few years, I also came to realize how much the staff contributed to the tonnage of materials the students carried. The average math, language arts of social studies book weighs two or three pounds. Drop a few of those in a back pack, add the proverbial three ring binder, agenda, Phys. Ed. supplies, water bottle and smuggled trading cards, and kids that weigh 115 pounds soaking wet are lugging a quarter of their body weight across the campus. Why, I wondered, should the students need to tote their texts back and forth daily? Why not a worksheet or a couple of pages of notes or even a zeroxed section of the book, rather than the book itself? It would save backs, and money, too (How many of those texts disappeared as the year wore on? Quite a few. Who had to pay for them at the close of the year? If the parents didn’t, the school had to.)

Also, there continued to be the problem of storage; where would these backpacks reside at school? Most campus lockers had been torn out (due to drug and weapon issues), and so the packs came to class and sat about in hulking masses, making foot traffic in between desks nigh impossible. The couldn't be stored outside due to theft, and if they were relegated to the back of the class there was a constant stream of students moving from desk to pack and back with items they 'had to have' in the middle of instruction. Oh, and all that stuff that had been stashed in lockers, causing threat to limb and law? That stuff was now in the classroom! I confiscated dozen of electronic games and gizmos, but more troublesome were matches, cigars, porn magazines, pipe bomb supplies, stolen prescription drugs, pipes for crack and a baggie of pot - in a sixth grade class!

Finding no good purpose to the use of backpacks and my subsequent banishment of them may cause a ruffle of irritation at the outset of the school year, but I feel it pretty much guarantees a safer, cleaner, healthier classroom and student body - literally.