In mid-September, a lottery took place to decide which students would receive parking hangers. Last year, all seniors who applied and a select few juniors were given spots, but many seniors this year are left with no place to regularly leave their cars.
The importance of having parking spaces varies. For some, parking is a luxury. It’s tempting take advantage of the extra minutes that driving to school allows.
“I wanted to be able to come in whenever I wanted and still have a parking spot that would be ready for me,” senior Jun DeBus said. He received a parking space.
This freedom of coming and going is accompanied with convenience for clubs and activities.
“I do soccer after school,” DeBus said. “Sometimes I have to stay after for stuff. Plus, I have clubs after school, like TSA and Science Olympiad, where it would be a lot easier to transport materials by having a spot instead of parking way down [Lake Braddock Drive].”
Other students find parking necessary.
“Both of my parents work, and I’m pupil placed,” senior Katie Curran said, “so I don’t even have a bus to get here, so other than driving, I really have no other way of getting to school. I live 20 minutes away from school. I’m in the Robinson district.” Curran, however, did not receive a spot.
Curran is not alone in her situation. Pupil placement, which involves a student attending a school even though he or she lives in another school’s district, is not uncommon. These students live farther from the school and do not have buses to aid them in their transportation.
“My mom has to take my sister to school, and I also have the Teachers for Tomorrow class, which requires driving to lots of schools,” senior Mary Matula said. She lives in the West Springfield district.
The distance forces students to leave their houses earlier in addition to needing to find a spot on ‘the drive’, a nickname for the street that runs adjacent to the school.
“I leave my house at 6:45am,” Matula said, “and I don’t leave [school] until 5:30pm to 6pm.”
Students are displeased with the senior parking shortage.
“I am very angry about it,” Curran said.
Even if they received spots, students can see the issues at hand.
“There’s lots of people that are angry that they didn’t get a spot,” DeBus said, “and there are some people in [the] academies that didn’t get a spot, and they kind of need to go. It’s kind of baloney.”
The limited parking , but there are proposals to improve the parking selection system. One example suggests a change in how the students are selected.
“Read the reasons section,” Curran said, “and do it by that. Anybody who has extracurriculars, anybody who’s pupil placed, whose parents both work, give them a spot first, and then move it to people who might just want it for their senior year, and then give to juniors whatever’s left over.”
Another idea is to expand the parking lot.
“I feel like they should use the blacktop,” Matula said. “Use half of it for P.E. and half of it for parking.”

Regardless of the current outcome, it is important that the administrators find an effective and fair solution for this issue so that this does not happen again with future classes.