The lack of student parking at Carmel High School, especially for sophomores and juniors, is a continuing problem that has been highlighted with the addition of NO PARKING signs in the surrounding neighborhood. Due to this lack of available parking, some students have taken drastic measures.
“I wake up at 5:45 and have to rush out of my house to make it to high school in time simply to get a spot in the upper parking lot,” junior Carson Coppinger says.
Coppinger is not the only one to arrive at school long before the 7:45 a.m. start. A whole group of juniors make the early voyage to school to secure one of just ten parking spots available for juniors in the upper lot. This number has dropped from 25 in the 2015-16 school year because there are now more senior drivers.
Junior drivers note that they are the first people to arrive in the school parking lot.
“I don’t park on campus,” sophomore Jonny Shulstice mentions, “so I don’t have to worry about parking because there is always a spot off-campus, in the surrounding neighborhood.”
Over the summer, the county added NO PARKING signs along Morse Drive, the street next to the school, where sophomores and juniors have parked in previous years. According to assistant principal Craig Tuana, the county put up these signs without the school’s input.
“There is no other place for students to park on campus,” Tuana notes. “They are towing cars illegally parked without warning.”
As of now, the school offers no solution to this parking issue. This issue is intensified by the fact that the majority of students are legally forbidden from driving students under the age of 20. This causes a build-up of cars in the lower parking lot because many students cannot legally carpool.
“By adding the element of not having to break the law, it would give a lot of people incentive to carpool,” junior Logan Vandenbroucke says. “Right now, that law is holding a lot of people back.”
Another issue seen with the current sophomore and junior parking situation is that students who could easily walk to school are driving and taking up spots from students who have to drive to school.
“I personally think people that can walk to school should walk and not take up parking spots,” junior Keegan Forrester adds. “The baseball field is always really full of cars.”
With so many students driving to school every day, there might be some solution to this increasing concern, but the school has yet to find it.
-Preston Miglaw
