Parking lots show room for improvement

Parking+spaces+blocked+by+curb+stopper

Casey Stavenhagen

Parking spaces blocked by curb stopper

In high school, many students are the age 16 or over, which means that they all have the ability to drive themselves to school. This is, in almost every single way, very convenient for students as they are in control of what time they arrive at school, leave school, and where they go for lunch when they drive; however, the struggle to find parking is a common inconvenience to student drivers.

Around 8:00 a.m., the parking lots in the east begin to suffer from crowding, and students arriving late may have to park so far away from the building that the couple minute walk there can cause them to be tardy. Although this can mostly be accredited to poor planning on behalf of the students, with all factors included such as the 10 to 20 minutes longer it can take students to get to school with the ongoing traffic, it is an issue nonetheless.

An almost common sense solution to the time students waste just driving through parking lots searching for a space is assigned parking, even if just for senior students where students can pick the parking lot they want and the administration assigns the spots, which would also help with another issue of students driving to school without a parking pass.

If, when students brought their parking pass, they were assigned a parking spot, the parking, like many things, would become less of a hassle and more routine. While fixing the problem of finding parking, the school could also increase the school spirit students have by allowing the decoration of their own individual parking space during their free time, causing students to take more pride in their role at Randall and adding a colorful aesthetic to the parking lots.

Another issue, although it seems minor, is the recurrence of the curb stoppers being moved into the middle of the east parking lot and ignored for weeks to months. In the already crowded parking lot, this can block up several more spaces and be a huge inconvenience, while not being that difficult of a fix. I have witnessed a group of around six athletic guys picking the huge slab of concrete up and relocating it so that they may park, so it seems unlikely that it would be an unsolvable problem.

If, when the administration noticed a large concrete curb stopper they would go and ask one of the school’s coaches, then those coaches could spend a short amount of time on one of their off days or days of lifting to take five or six guys out to the parking lot to relocate the concrete, which would be a workout in and of itself.