Tuesday, September 27, 2016

Despite efforts, parking remains a controversy

Staff Writers
Chloe MacGillvray and Jacob McCloskey


With any major renovation project, there must be a few setbacks. Anyone who has been in New Hope long enough knows this well, given the 2005-2006 relocation of the entire LES to the UES. Now, the major issue we encounter is the crisis of student parking.
 At the end of the summer, seniors had the opportunity to sign up for parking passes; however, there were only 100 available spots. For some people, their time had come to expire. By the time school started, not every senior and junior who drove had received a parking pass, creating absolute chaos. Around the second week of school, more passes were permitted, with the request for a rationale as to why the applying student needs a spot. While more seniors and some juniors got spots, there is still a moderately large group of seniors and an even larger group of juniors that don’t have a spot. Being the bright thinkers NHS students are, many decided to drive to school, but park in the St. Martin’s church parking lot.
 We interviewed multiple people parking in the St. Martin’s church parking lot to see how they feel. Natalie Borys, a senior who did not receive a parking pass in the earlier lottery, is concerned about the parking situation in the winter.
 “Even though it's a nice walk before school I'm not looking forward to the winter. The walk itself is much shorter than I thought, only three minutes. I'm just worried for the winter.”
 Other students, specifically seniors, are more concerned with how fairly the parking passes were handed out. Grace Rekowski, a senior unable to obtain a parking spot, stated: “I think that it's ridiculous that the school is letting juniors who only have their permits to get parking permits but not even giving it to seniors who have work after school as well as extracurricular activities. I get that there is limited parking due to the construction but there are still a decent amount of spots in the front by the theater and it doesn't make sense that they can't give out more parking permits to the remaining students who don't have them. They asked us for our rationales on why we need the permit but it does not seem that they even took it into consideration.”
 Another senior, Claire Dougherty, stated: “As a strong supporter of senior privilege, given that my class has endured three years of watching the seniors have it better, it's not fun to watch juniors have parking passes and have at least a two minute walk saved. The first- come first- serve policy is fair in theory, but it's not fair now that every other essence of senior privilege was taken from the class of 2017. At least let us park.”
 The walk from St. Martin’s is going to become difficult as the year goes on for every grade at New Hope, especially for our seniors.