Upperclassmen irritated by parents in parking lot

It is 7:45 on a Monday morning, and the last thing senior Amanda Schwartz wants is to be late to first period.  She breathes a heavy sigh of relief when she finds a parking spot to the entrance of the school, but just as she turns on her blinkers to claim it, a parent driver pulls into the parking space from the opposite direction. 

“The parking lot can get really backed up,” Schwartz said. “And parents who take our parking, instead of dropping off at the drop off, can get super annoying.”

Schwartz, among other upperclassmen, believes that many parents in the parking lot are bothersome and dangerous.

“It’s very dangerous because not only are all new drivers dangerous, but also parents who aren’t looking where they are going,”  Schwartz added. 

Senior Shireen Kaul said the problem is mainly in the morning when parents park to drop off their kids at school.

“Parents will take our parking spots, the ones that are up in the front.  They wait for their kids to take a nap, or eat their breakfast, and they just stay there,” Kaul said.  “They wait for their kid to go to the trunk and get their backpack, and by that time, a line starts forming.”

Kaul recalls one morning when she witnessed a parent parking horizontally across three parking spaces in the junior lot.

“The parent wasn’t supposed to park there in the first place, and then they took up two extra spaces,” Kaul explained. “They moved five minutes before the bell rang, so anybody who would actually want to be on time for school couldn’t park there.”

Additionally, Kaul said that she often sees parents doing unsafe things in the parking lots. 

“Sometimes, when an arrow on the ground is obviously pointing one direction, I see parents driving the opposite way,” Kaul said.

  Kaul added that most accidents that occur are the effect of a parent and a students hitting each other.

This October, senior Allison Bruno got in to an accident when she backed out of her parking space after school.  She said that although there was little damage, it was extremely awkward and annoying.

“I was thinking, ‘Well you are not exactly supposed to be in the parking lot in the first place, and if you are going to be here, you might as well be careful,’” Bruno said. 

Bruno added that it is unfair that students have to pay for a parking permit when parents can “just take our spots.”  She said the best way to keep parents out of the parking lot is to have the school issue tickets anyone who parks in the lots without a permit.

On the other hand, Schwartz takes matters into her own hands by talking to parents who park in the parking lot.

“I have started to knock on car windows and say, ‘Hey, you’re not supposed to be here,’ in the politest way possible,” Schwartz said. “Most parents are pretty nice about it, but this one woman that I tried to talk to didn’t even open the window.  She just screamed the words, ‘I know!,’ from inside her car and sped away.”

Schwartz said that another popular method to reduce the number of parents in the parking lots is to lecturing the students whose parents park in the parking lot.   

“Some people will just go to the kid and tell them ‘you shouldn’t be here,’ so it makes the kid feel bad and think, ‘Shoot, I don’t want to be yelled at by an upperclassman, so maybe I shouldn’t get dropped off here anymore,’” Schwartz said.