The student parking lot proves to be problematic time and time again. While most students have a parking spot, there are no guarantees or protections against your spot being usurped. There are also a number of cars that get damaged. The parking lot has many issues, and parking spots are just one of them.

The current issues include: the size of the parking spaces, the stickers, the crosswalks, and students stealing other students’ parking spaces.

Parking spaces being stolen is a problem that seems to happen to many members of the student body. One improvement that has been made this year to deter this problem is the repainting of the numbers marking the spots, making them actually noticeable.

However, there should be someone from the administration who goes to the student lot every day to check if each car is in its rightful space. While there has been someone out there to check, it has not been consistent enough to prevent misconduct.

To build on this idea of someone going and checking cars, there should also be a section on Veracross where students can report a stolen spot. This would save a parking lot monitor a lot of time.

Instead of having the monitor go out to check each car, as previously suggested, he or she could just go to the reported spot and make sure everything is fine.

Another issue is that students have had the stickers fall off of the inside of their back window. The stickers contain the parking spot a student has and are used to verify that a student is currently in his or her spot. This needs to be fixed immediately as people will get in trouble if their stickers aren’t noticeable. A solution to this is offering students the option of a sticker or a tag.

The size of parking spaces must also be addressed. The size of the spots are inconsistent and some vehicles come close to going over the lines. While this may be the driver’s fault, it would be better to prevent this issue from happening at all.

The parking spots are too small and need to be resized. While this will result in fewer parking spots, this will lessen the chance of an accident happening and make it easier for students to park.

Along with the problems of the parking spots, going from the parking lot to the school is also huge mess. Traffic is held up due to the oddly placed crosswalks

Even though people still use the old crosswalk, the newly placed crosswalk is an improvement due to stopping less traffic, but it has not done enough to fix the traffic interruptions that students create by crossing the street that connects the loop to the parking lot.

The new crosswalk, combined with the crossing guard, helps to improve traffic by only stopping cars that want to go around the loop, instead of cars that want to be going around the loop as well as those going inside the student parking lot.

However, this still halts traffic because those who want to go around the loop wait for students to cross and hold up everyone else.

A better solution is to make a sidewalk on the loop around the outside, near the turf fields, glenn, and baseball field. Then students can use this path to get to school, rather than going across the street.

This eliminates the problem of students walking across and stopping traffic. Fixing the parking lots would make it easier for everybody to get to school on time as there would be fewer delays.

It would also fix other issues, such as car damages. The parking lots have a multitude of problems that need to be addressed and fixed within a reasonable period of time.