The Struggle for Parking

NIck Emig

When you get to school, you scramble to try and find an open parking spot. Sometimes you can’t find one, so what do you do? You go out to the street and park or you bounce the curb and are forced to park in the grass with hopes of not getting stuck in the mud. The parking at MVHS is bad.  Though it has gotten better over time, it still needs a lot of improvements. More parking and more room to travel up and down the lanes are what students want. But the parking lot isn’t the only issue; it’s also the drivers not knowing how to park. When you look at the parking lot from the classrooms all you see is every spot taken up and cars parked up in the grass. Parking in the grass will kill the grass over time, and that will make the school look bad.

One way that this could be fixed is by expanding the west parking lot some more and making three rows to park. Another way is to take out the medians. Each median could be two extra parking spots. Even though this takes out pedestrian walkways, it helps improve the parking lot situation it gains parking spots allowing more students to park so they don’t have to park on the grass.

Another way to fix the problem is to widen the parking lots. The lane you drive down is supposed to be a one way, but not everyone follows these rules, and then you get a car jam and people are sitting there for awhile. If we expanded the lanes for another car length, then people could go up and down them both ways not causing a car jam.

The good news is more parking is coming.  “Construction is taking up about 14 parking spots so after they are done, that will be 14 more spots available to park,” said Assistant Principle Matt Thede. “After the community center is done there will be another 30-50 parking spots available to park in,” said Thede. But with these new parking spots at the community center, it’s a little longer walk over the high school.