Can you believe it? Statewide meetings! Not on Superferry, not on a gas cap or even traffic cams. ... Statewide meetings on whether school administrators can search high school students' lockers.

Sixty-eight Hawai'i high school students were named semifinalists in the National Merit Scholars program last week. 'Iolani had 32 students on the list. Punahou had 17. Hawai'i public high schools had a grand total of six: one from Kaua'i High, one from Waiakea, one from Mililani and three from Kaiser. Hooray for Kaiser.

There ought to be statewide meetings to find out why there were only six public school students who scored high enough on the SAT to ring the bell.

The Board of Education needs to make a decision on locker searches and move on to more pressing issues of education instead of this "vote, take it back, vote again, take it on the road" dawdling. Searching lockers can't possibly be the biggest issue in public schools.

Wasn't there a movie with Kevin Bacon about this in the '80s where they checked his locker to see if he was secretly dancing? Weren't the kids in the Breakfast Club bemoaning locker searches during their monologues? Didn't the petty principal check Ferris Bueller's locker during his day off? In most silly movies about high school, there's a scene where the school administration is doggedly looking the wrong way while the kids laugh at the earnest, misguided attention.

If a kid is sneaky enough to be selling drugs on campus, chances are the little drug dealer isn't going to leave the stash in his or her locker. Who uses lockers anyway? The public school system can't afford to buy books. The public school system can't afford to fix the broken, rusty, cannot-lock lockers. The students don't have much to lock and nothing to lock it in.

If we're going to fret over privacy in the public schools, perhaps we should start with the basics, like bathroom stalls with doors that work. Or bathroom stalls with working doors AND toilet paper. Maybe that's not so much an issue of privacy but decency, but in too many high school bathrooms, the students have neither.

And in too many high schools, the students already feel disadvantaged because of their enrollment in a system that does not foster academic achievement, and their suspicions are affirmed when no one seems bothered by their conspicuous absence on the lists of academic elite.

Just make the decision and get on with it. The schools have bigger problems than should they or should they not look through a tangle of funky gym clothes.

Lee Cataluna's column runs Tuesdays, Fridays and Sundays. Reach her at 535-8172 or lcataluna@honoluluadvertiser.com.