CARS: New staff parking spots cause trouble for students
Logan Schwab pulls into the stadium lot around 7:40 am. He goes into his normal row and parks in the same section he has been since he got his license two months ago. All is normal, and Schwab proceeds to his first period class. Little does Schwab know that the spot he has just parked in is located in an area recently converted to “staff only” spots. When Schwab gets to his car to go to lunch, he notices a little slip of paper on the corner of his windshield. It is a $43 ticket for violating parking restrictions by parking in a spot that would have been perfectly available for students to use the week before.
Last month, the school converted a whole new section of general parking spots in the stadium lot to “staff only” spots in order to create more room for administrators and teachers to park.
However, even before the new spots were added, many of the already existing “staff only” spots were remaining vacant throughout the day. “There was already a lot of space (for staff to park)”, junior Clayton Webster said.
John Ariola, whose dad is a PE teacher at Davis High, admits that the new staff parking really hasn’t made much of a difference. “The new spots haven’t really made it easier for him to park,” Ariola said.
Now, with the addition of more new staff spots, many students have been finding it increasingly difficult to find parking in the stadium lot. “It’s twice as hard to find a spot even though there’s a lot of open staff spots,” junior Hudson Forrester said. “It forced me to park in the street.”
What concerns many students is not that the staff is getting special treatment with the addition of exclusive parking spots, but rather the fact that these spots, which were formerly accessible to the public remain unused nearly 62 % of the time. “There are always 10 to 15 open staff spots that students can’t use and they end up having to park in the street,” Schwab said.
In fact, on a recent Thursday, just before lunch, 26 out of the 42 staff spots were vacant while only one of the 67 spots accessible to students was not being used.
“The school should get rid of half of their staff spaces and make them student parking. They will never fill up even half of the amount (of “staff only” spots) that they have currently,” Schwab said.
