Senior Ivy Browning had finished all her classes and was about to go home when she noticed a white note on her windshield: a warning from the school for unauthorized parking.
“I saw [the warning] on my windshield and I was super confused because I did have a parking pass. But I get it, I was parked in the wrong lot,” Browning said.
While administrators had to hand out a few warnings in the first semester, the number of parking offenders grew increasingly higher in the second semester, forcing parking reinforcement to be stricter.
Unauthorized parking has resulted in threats of towing for repeated offenders. Towing for parking without a pass may seem excessive, but the school has reasons for the harsh parking enforcement. Parking passes are sold two weeks before the school starts and are limited to only seniors and juniors. Although 20% of parking passes are oversold in order to account for students’ absences and off-campus schedules, approximately 75 students remain on the waitlist for a parking pass. This number, however, does not take into account students who may have received their license after September or sophomores who have a license.
“What happens [is that] when sophomores turn 16, they get their license, so they’ll just start testing the waters to see if they can get away with [parking without a pass]. They might for a day or two or maybe a week, but eventually they get caught,” school administration manager Jason Maitland said. “As the school year goes on, more kids turn 16, more kids get their license, more kids get vehicles and they just try to park. We just have to kind of keep a balance as best we can.”
The first week of the second semester, parking lot security was tight. First, the parking lot is searched for cars without parking passes or with fake ones. When the car is spotted, their license plate is recorded in a spreadsheet and a paper warning is given. After the third warning, large, squared white stickers are placed on the students’ windshield as a final warning. If the car comes back, the school resource officer would run the license plate through to find the owner of the car and call them down to administration. At that point, parents and students will be informed that if the car appears another time in the lot, the school will tow the car at the owner’s expense. While more than 30 cars have been stickered, no cars have been towed yet this year.
“I don’t have a problem towing a car, but there are procedures that I want to ensure we follow first. When you get caught speeding, you can’t complain to the cop…when you get caught, you have to face consequences for it,” principal Robert Frasca said.
There are two lots that are available for parking: the green lot located by the carline and the red lot located by the gymnasium and auditorium. Typically the green lot is used by students who have three periods off-campus. The red lot is designated for everyone else. While the parking lots have been optimized to their full capacity, it simply does not meet the overwhelming demand.
“When I became a principal, the last thing that I expected to cause the most stress in my job would be student parking,” Frasca said. “I really wish I could provide parking for every student who had a license, but we cannot.”
