It is no secret that Westside High School doesn’t have enough parking. This has been an issue for many years but seems to continue to go without a solution. Currently, the only way to get a spot close to school is the lottery. The lottery is a system that randomly picks students for the available parking Westside does have. Students who don’t win lottery need to get to school at 7 am or earlier to be able to park.
Now, this contradicts the hope of students being able to get the recommended 8-9 hours of sleep a night. The parking situation creates a race to get a spot so it falls along with the common phrase, “the early bird gets the worm”.
At the start of the school year, it wasn’t as difficult to get to school by 7:30am and get a spot on the hill. The issue intensifies when the sophomore class starts to get their licenses throughout the year. Then, the competition really begins to heat up to get a spot to park in.
Brian Stevens, the dean of freshman and sophomore boys is in charge of parking. Stevens realizes that the parking is an issue and said he wants students to know that administration knows and wishes there was more they could do.
“I want to make sure students know that we understand there’s a parking situation, a problem really,” said Stevens. “Any resolution would require quite a bit of money to fix it unfortunately.”
Students without a pass, who also do not get to school early enough, suffer the consequence of having to park a block away. Stevens said the parking issue is hard to deal with when street parking isn’t available to students. The walk to school from the hill is already lengthy, adding the extra block from 88th and Hickory creates a 5-10 minute walk into school.
“One thing that’s really caused a problem is around our school a lot of neighbors have put up ‘No Parking’ signs in front of their houses,” said Stevens. “That’s made it really tough on us because now we can’t really offer street parking either except the parking along our own curbs.”
When winter strikes and the cold, windy weather rears its ugly head, students who have to park on the hill or even a block away are freezing by the time they reach the school. This walk could cause many issues in itself, including slipping on ice, getting sick, or even getting frostbite.
Finding a parking spot in the morning should be the last worry of students in high school, but it is the first struggle of the day for Westside students.
Stevens said there are a few ideas that have been proposed, but refuted, because they just aren’t viable solutions for our school.
“Unfortunately, any solutions at this point would cost money,” Stevens said. “Whether that be making more parking spots or [a] grand schema: a parking garage or something cool like that.”
One of the solutions offered was when Countryside Community Church decided to move. There was conversation that Westside could purchase the land and create more parking. That wasn’t be a feasible solution due to recent budget issues.
Right now, there really is no realistic solution for the parking issue. Stevens said he hopes that the struggle of parking could be alleviated by students finding other ways to school.
“It’s not a good situation, so that’s why we strongly encourage carpooling and walking to school if you live close enough,” said Stevens. “It would be much better for our parking situation if students could walk or carpool to leave our parking for those who need it.”
