As the second semester hit many more students began to park in the student parking lot. This left little to no spaces open for students who come to school later in the day. In order to park in the student parking lot students must purchase a green parking pass for twenty dollars. However, there are many students who park in spaces without a parking permit. This is unfair to students who have a paid the fee but still do not have any open spots to park in when they arrive to school.

With 224 total spots (including reserved/visitor spots), and anywhere from 220 to 235 in the parking lot at a time it sometimes becomes chaotic during busy times of the day. Nate Brown says “it is outrageous that [he] payed for a parking permit and don’t always have a spot to park in.” Many students are forced to park along the curb and in the traffic circle or even in the middle of an aisle. To make things more difficult, there are only 198 spaces available to students and on average 70 of those spaces are taken by students with either expired passes or no pass at all. Additionally, during our investigation, we also found an average of 15 non-reserved spaces occupied by staff vehicles. This leaves many students very frustrated because so little is being done about the parking problem. While talking to a group of juniors they wanted to make some suggestions to prevent the parking problems for next year. Some changes included, switching parking lots with the staff so students have more space or we could simply assign parking spots.

After speaking with Principal Berry he said that the money we pay for our parking permits goes to paying for the permits themselves. The remaining funds go into a general student account which assists students with the costs of school fees. With so many people parking without paying the fee the school is losing out on approximately $1700 that could be used to help some of our fellow Titans who are less fortunate with various school related fees. Although the money is going to a good cause a number of students complain about the twenty dollar fee and wish it could be lowered. With the money the school has they are looking into getting hang tags so they are more visible and it will be easier to see who has parking permits and who does not in future years.

Students often complain about staff parking in the student parking lot outside of the reserved spaces for administration, especially because there are always a couple dozen open parking spots in the staff lot on the opposite side of the school building. So, one simple fix would be to enforce the rules for staff too. If a staff member is currently coaching they are allowed to park in the student parking lot during the day. However, there are on average 8-10 staff cars that don’t belong to current coaches occupying spots that students paid for. If students can’t park in the open spots in the staff parking lot, the staff should not be able to take the only spots students are allowed to park in. Another common complaint is the cost of parking passes most student would like them to be cheaper and most students recommending halving the cost.  

For our investigation, we counted cars on four different days to develop the average numbers we’ve published here. This may not be the most in depth investigation, but we believe it presents an accurate picture of a daily problem  here at THS. We also believe that this problem could be easily fixed if school leadership enforced the parking requirements for both students and staff.