Imagine it’s 8:23 AM, and you’re just pulling into the school parking lot. You overslept a little after a late night of studying, and you arrived later than you usually do. Unfortunately, as you slowly roll through the lot, you realize that there are simply no more spots.
Everyone who drives to school has noticed it by now: after winter break, it’s suddenly much, much harder to find a parking spot in the mornings. While I used to be able to get to school at 8:20 and easily pull in to a spot, I now sometimes get there even earlier and am still forced to circle until I finally find one on the opposite side of the parking lot. The reason for this influx of cars is the sophomores, who either got their licenses over break or were gifted their own cars. While sophomores definitely have a right to drive to school, I believe that the priority should be for the upperclassmen.
The upperclassmen have been told that the only solution to this problem is to get to school even earlier, or they’ll have to park in the overflow lot across the street. The overflow lot is a long walk from school, and if you had already been looking for a spot for a while before deciding to park there, there’s a good chance you’d be late to class.
For seniors, another response to this issue has often been, “if you had painted a parking spot, you would always have somewhere to park.” The problem with this is that painting a spot is not the most accessible thing. Paying for both the spot and the paint, brushes and stencils can get pretty costly, not to mention the amount of time it takes. There were only two four hour periods on Saturday mornings for seniors to paint them, and many people I know simply couldn’t make it to one or both of those times. In addition, upperclassmen have never had to deal with this problem in the past, so nobody expected to need a spot of their own.
In this case, I believe that seniority should come into play much more. Seniors have a few privileges at school, such as skip days, the senior section or the 3 minutes of early release. These are something I’ve always looked forward to throughout my time at Robinson, and I never once thought it was unfair to the underclassmen. I think these privileges should apply to parking, too.
One solution for future years could be to have a senior section in the parking lot, where every senior who pays for a parking pass is an assigned a spot and they can then choose to paint it or not. While this is a little more far fetched, even something as simple as having the new sophomore drivers park in the overflow lot could solve the issue completely. They could plan on parking there, so they wouldn’t be late to class, and the main parking lot would be free for upperclassmen.
Treating every student at Robinson with respect and fairness is necessary, of course, but I do think that when the sophomores now become upperclassmen, they’ll agree that they should have priority in the main parking lot.
