photo credit: Mackenna Miller
A student leaves their house at 7:50 a.m. to get to school by 8:05 a.m. When they get to the school parking lot, there’s no parking left for them in the main parking lot. They then drive to the overflow parking lot and yet again find no parking. Their last resort is the baseball parking lot. By this time, it is 8:03 a.m., and it is a seven-minute walk into school. They then receive their third tardy and get detention after school.
Attendance secretaries tell students to get to school earlier in order to not receive a tardy. After three tardies, they receive a detention, although most of the students who receive these tardies get to school with plenty of time to park and walk inside if there was parking available.
There is not enough parking available for students in close proximity to the school. Students who drive and also have a late arrival experience this lack of parking on a day-to-day basis.
In the beginning of the year, the school had plenty of parking where if students had late arrivals, they could park closer to the school. It is when the underclassmen start getting their licenses at the end of December that the parking lot gets really overcrowded.
If there was enough parking, fewer students would be receiving as many tardies, and because there would be more parking spots students would have no reason to be late.
Many students have found loopholes to the rule in the winter months and have figured out that a tardy is still a tardy whether a student is a minute late or 30 minutes late. If a student knows they are going to be tardy, they will just leave school and get back 30 minutes later because it is no different.
A solution to this overcrowding problem in the parking lot is to stop selling parking passes at the end of the second quarter. Students who have their license before this time would be able to drive to school, but others would not. This solution would help to solve the problem of not enough parking and too many students being tardy.
The school now has 761 parking spots available to students, teachers and staff. Olentangy High School has 867, Olentangy Berlin has 881 parking spots and Liberty High School has 1,081 parking spots, according to the Columbus Dispatch.
Out of every Olentangy high school, Orange has the least amount of parking spots. This is due to the fact that the school was built on a wetland. So, adding more parking would simply not be an option. In order to combat this problem, school officials can stop selling parking passes to students at the end of the first semester.
Historically, during the first couple of years the high school was open, sophomores had to wait six months before they were able to get their parking pass and drive to school. Most sophomores get their license and parking passes through winter break or in the beginning of the year in the months January and February. Stopping the selling of parking passes or even making sophomores wait would not be that much different from what has happened in the past.
Seniors do have seniority and have their assigned parking spots. The same should happen for juniors. Juniors should have seniority over sophomores and should have the rest of the main lot that isn’t filled with reserved spots and the overflow lot to park in. The sophomores should have to park in the baseball lot.
The school could also give everyone a reserved parking spot at the beginning of the year and once they are out of parking spots they stop selling them. This would help students better plan for making it to school on time.
If limiting parking passes isn’t possible, the administration could propose building their parking lot up and creating a parking garage due to the lack of space available for parking. This would help students be on time.
Parking is a major problem for many students and is causing many tardies and detentions.
