We never thought that we would be writing an article complaining about the school parking lot, but here we are, complaining about the school parking lot.

Every single day, we arrive at school, along with many other students, to find cars “temporarily” parked in front of our spots before school, and even worse, blocking our ability to get out of our spots after school.

This is an extremely frustrating situation. As students, we often have to meet with teachers before school. Then, after school, we need to leave to go to sports, jobs, or other extracurricular activities. However, we are consistently not able to leave right away because a multitude of parents are blocking our cars in the rows of the student parking lot. In addition, some of these parents don’t move when students have signaled with their reverse lights that they need to leave.

This experience is widespread, and we are not the only students who feel frustrated about this:

• “This is a huge inconvenience to me. There hasn’t been a day this year that a parent hasn’t parked in front of my spot. This endlessly blocks me from parking or leaving. Parents drop off their kids right in front of my spot. Every day after school I try and leave school quickly, but I’m stopped by the rows of parents who park behind my car. Even when they see me walk to my car and turn it on they don’t even bother to move.” -Elsa Sierk, senior
• “A lot of parents usually park right behind my parking spot. I usually have to wait for them to leave because I can’t back up when they are there. It’s pretty annoying because I just want to leave but I can’t without hitting them.” -Carson LeMaire, senior
• “I can never get out of school on time unless I leave super early because people just sit behind my car.” -Grant Starr, senior
• “I get why parents come and park in the parking lot, but it’s really annoying because we are trying to back out and you just can’t because they are blocking the way. I know they are waiting for their kids but I just want to back out.” -Rue Johanes, senior

We have a proposal: La Salle should place cones directing parents away from parking in the main lot in the afternoon. More importantly, cones should also be placed at the end of each row so that parents cannot drive down the rows and park in front of students’ cars at the end of the school day while they are waiting for their child.

We have provided visuals to help explain our idea:

We, as well as all of the students we talked to, believe that this parking lot issue is a problem that urgently needs to be fixed. The school has the ability to resolve this problem easily using the solution we provide above. We ask that the school administration takes our proposal seriously and works to find a quick resolution to this problem.

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Are you annoyed by this parking lot headache? Or do you have a different idea for how to resolve this? Let us know in the comments below.