STAY IN YOUR LANE
Time to Fix PV High’s Parking Problem
“Late again, I see,” your first period teacher says as you walk into the room after a grueling battle for a parking space.
“I know, I know, but you should really see the never-ending line of cars waiting to enter the parking lot. Plus, once you finally get in, it takes forever to find a spot. I guess I’ll leave the house earlier tomorrow,” you tiredly say.
A new school year comes with a rise in stress and anxiety for almost all high school students, but who would have thought that making it to class on time because of parking would sit high on the list of stressors for students?
It seems that PVHS’s dated parking system has finally been taking its toll over the last few years, as the number of student drivers has been increasing.
Though PV High can’t exactly make more room for parking to make it easier on students, there are definitely some improvements that could make the morning rush less stressful.
For instance, the administration could better enforce separation of the grades by parking lot. Currently, our two student lots are already divided into senior and junior spaces; however, there is no real enforcement of parking by grade level.
This leads to some juniors taking up senior spots because of “easier access” or shade, leaving the remaining seniors to hunt through the smaller junior lot for a parking space.
When all spaces are full, some are forced to park in illegitimate areas or even in the spare teacher spaces, causing another problem for the administration to fix.
As one can imagine,the situation only worsens when sophomores start driving, adding a whole new set of wheels to the problem.
All of this is not to say that our new administration has been sitting idly by every morning while upperclassmen battle it out for a corner spot.
With new teacher-assigned parking spaces, the idea was to give the students more space to park, but that hasn’t exactly been the case.
However, the latest changes have not been as beneficial to students as we have hoped.
Instead, the slight increase in student room has seemed negligible, because when trying to park in what was previously an available spot but is now reserved as a “teacher area,” students are violating the new system and consequently pulled out of class to move their car.
Capitalizing on the already-compromised situation, parking spots have now been on sale to students who can afford to pay the high price. Within these personal parking spaces, no others are allowed to park in the purchased spot, even when the student who bought it is absent.
The idea that students are paying for parking spots is already a budding corruption, but it especially highlights the urgency and importance of this parking crisis.
For the rest of the students who are left to fend for themselves early in the morning, sooner than later there needs to be a solution to the parking problem.
A short-term solution would be for administration to enforce the parking system according to grade, giving seniors priority to the senior lot.
As for students, those who live close to school should consider walking or biking to school instead of taking up another precious parking space after a thirty-second drive to school.