Every morning, the Leominster High School parking lot fills with students from across the city and nearby towns arriving for class. To keep things organized, the school requires all student drivers to obtain a parking pass in order to park on campus.
“The parking system hasn’t changed at all,” said the new Dean of Students, Steve McCaughey. “It’s just being enforced as it has been in place for years.”
This enforcement of the parking pass also comes with a set of guidelines. Students must not park in the teachers’ lot, the CTEI parking lot, or the parking in front of the school.
While these rules aim to maintain safety of all students and their vehicles, it has sparked some frustrations for many students. Especially ones who have early morning work studies. They are able to come into school late (past 7:30am) and legal parking spots tend to fill up quickly, leaving late arrivals scrambling for spots.
“I got to school late and there were no more spots, so I had to park in an unsafe spot.” said LHS Senior Tessa Rafuse. “Now I have to get to school so much earlier than I need to, which throws off my morning routine.”
LHS Senior Zachary Consalvo said, “I get to school an hour later, then I usually have a difficult time finding a parking spot.” He added, “More parking spots would benefit my parking experience at LHS.”
There are consequences for parking in restricted zones. A first offence is getting a yellow warning ticket placed on the car letting you know that you cannot park there, and next time there will be more consequences.
“So I’ve only gone out there once and put pretend tickets on the cars once just as warnings,” said McCaughey.
As we have heard on announcements over the years, there have been problems over the past few years with students blocking other cars in. This system is put in place to teach good behavior.
Many students have expressed frustration about needing parking passes. They have noticed that the teachers’ lot often has plenty of open spaces, but they must not park there.
Although many are upset, the rules are clear: students must get a parking pass and not park in the teachers’ lot. These measures aren’t meant to be unfair.
On the other hand, it seems some students’ frustration has gotten the attention of the dean as McCaughey said, “I’d really like to get a good accurate count on how many staff members are parking there so that we can then make sure that we are not reserving all of the big teachers’ lot. I think a lot of teachers are actually parking other places, so once we get a handle on that, we can find some more spots for students.”
Going forward, with the track being constructed behind the school, they are working on a new parking lot with about 50 new parking spots which should help with the commotion.
