The issues that come with going to a large school include crowding, and things won’t be getting better anytime soon. Especially with that dang parking lot. Unless there is a solution…

The parking lot is home to many memorable moments, from car accidents to comically bad parking. But the biggest issue BHS students have tends to be leaving the parking lot. Especially for those who drive, the pain is understood. Oftentimes, it takes a half-hour to leave, if that. That’s the issue. The parking lot is still too crowded, even with two parking lots.

I’ve been in a few rough situations involving the parking lot myself. My car has been hit three times. All of that within a month. My car was first hit when it was parked and I was leaving the parking lot, then when I was waiting in line at a stop sign. The first situation was actually a hit and run, but the person got caught. It also led to the whole bumper being replaced on my car. These are some examples of “bad driving” I’ve dealt with because people are in such a rush to leave. 

You could argue the situations listed above are only due to bad driving, but it wouldn’t be so bad if there were fewer people rushing out of the parking lots, or if there were fewer inexperienced drivers. No offense to the sophomores — I drove to school as a sophomore, too, and I wasn’t super comfortable. That leads us to one final solution (besides building yet another parking lot), not allowing any underclassmen to drive.

Now, before I’m accused of being selfish or something, I should say that, yes, I am aware this would anger or inconvenience some people, but everyone’s inconvenienced trying to leave anyway, and we all need to make sacrifices.

Student responses were somewhat predictable. Sophomore Emily Kehoe thought this would be a bad idea. She said, “I would rather go to school on my own time, rather than have to wake up at 5:45 to make the bus.”

Senior Dylan Kolb said, “There’d be a lot more places to park, I personally believe it will be less chaotic. I personally feel like it would also flow quicker, people with more driving would be more patient.”

I decided to try and discover what many different students actually thought of this potential solution, so I conducted a survey of students in all grade levels to see what the citizens of Blaine thought. I made the hypothesis that everyone except the Sophomores would be on board with the solution I proposed. The actual results of the survey are listed below. 

*Results listed and in order by grade*

As you can surely see, there were some differences between the opinions of some of the BHS students. We see that the Freshmen who were polled, though not high in number, all shared the opinion that they didn’t have an opinion. That was expected since they haven’t felt the pain and agony of that “parking lot”. 

Secondly, the sophomores. The group that’s getting “called out”, per se. As expected, a majority, a little over 60%, either strongly disagreed or simply disagreed. However, what surprised me was the number of Sophomores who were either “neutral” or had “no opinion on this issue”. A total of 29% put those two options down, which was higher than originally thought, seeing as this is the affected group.

Next, the upperclassmen. The juniors thought differently than the Sophomores (no surprise). Nearly 75% agreed it would help. Then of course there were some stragglers who actually didn’t think it would help. But overall nothing too surprising with the Junior’s responses.

With the seniors, we only got 13 responses, but the results seem to be what I expected. A little more than 50% thought it would help, and a few of them had no opinion on the issue, which might have to do with them graduating this year. Also, like the juniors, there were some who disagreed, which caught me off guard that some juniors and seniors were against the idea.

As everyone can plainly see, a majority of us (yes me too) seem to think removing sophomore parking permits would help, but the sophomores should get a say too. Although, the parking lot sucks, so I’m in favor of kicking them out, and most of us in the school probably are, so why not? I don’t know, you decide what you think is best. Don’t be afraid to voice your opinion on this issue either. Will it ever go into effect, though? Doubt it.