I’m part of a group of students who is just far too lazy, or just don’t want to go to the Start Smart driving classes, pay the $40, and get a parking pass, so we park on the street. (As a side note, I really do think $40 is way too expensive to be paying for parking here, but that’s a whole different opinion.) This is about the loss of spots outside the parking lot due to construction, a loss that is not only affecting me but affecting a good portion of students.

One morning I had left my house five minutes earlier than normal (though I live only a mile away, I’m just too lazy to walk) so I was pretty certain I was guaranteed a parking spot close to the entrance of the lot. To my dismay, the whole section of street I park on was completely taken over by pickup trucks. These trucks, I came to figure out, were being used during the construction. Ahead of this small stretch of sidewalk was a huge loading truck taking up a whole other section of parking students use. I hastily drove around the corner and stole the spot of some poor soul on the other edge of the parking lot on the hill, and I felt horrible about it.

I feel as though an unspoken rule in high school is people have their specific parking spots that they park in, and it’s respected not to park there. I feel as though this doesn’t apply just to the inner parking lot, but the outer as well. I’ve began to notice that where I park, the same five or six cars park there every day too. And in front of me, the same eight or nine cars park there as well. When you displace those students, they have to displace other students, who then displace other students, and so on and so forth.

I guess I really can’t blame the construction workers for this; they’re just trying to do their job. But with the fact that the construction already took up so many spots in the lower level parking lot, and the looming prospect that more might be gone by the end of the year, it’s a stressful idea to wonder where students are going to park. More and more kids are getting their licenses, and more and more cars need somewhere to go for the day. At least half of the outer parts of the school are not open for public street parking, and many neighborhoods surrounding SDA are already filled with cars by those who live there.

So what’s the answer to this problem? We can’t force the construction workers to move somewhere else when there’s nowhere else they can go, we can’t park on the roads marked No Parking, and we can’t exactly go knocking on doors in neighborhoods asking the people who live there to move their cars. One clear solution I can see to this problem is to lower the parking pass price so more people park in the lot, as I know I really don’t want to pay $40 for something I don’t think is worth $40, and I’m sure many others don’t want to either. The ultimate problem with this though is more people will get passes, and there’s less parking in the lot which again will displace students, and also maybe the school won’t get the funding it needs. But the other solution I see to this, for the future, is to attempt as much as possible to keep construction away from the parking lot during the school year. I know this isn’t exactly an immediate solution, but it’s probably the only one we’ve got.

I know for me as a returning senior next year, I want to be able to park in or next to the parking lot, especially since I feel as though I’m losing SDA to the construction anyway. If I’m losing the comfort of my high school in its normalcy, I should at least be able to put my car somewhere for the day without fighting to get a spot or parking god knows where and running to class late. I just don’t think that’s worth a new field.