The school parking lot is consistently full. Students are walking in from the far lot at the furthest edge of the school property in the cold and rainy Washington mornings, hastily walking to their first class. With a parking lot this jam-packed, accidents are bound to happen. A solution must exist to alleviate the parking space problem and increase the safety of the student parking lot.

Alleviating the jam-packed parking lot can be done in multiple ways. Suggested by juniors and seniors alike, the question has come up of whether or not Tahoma High School should have separate parking areas for juniors and seniors.

Having separate parking areas for juniors and seniors would not work yet this year since many students have been given the old sophomore parking passes, as we have run out of the correct color of passes for their grade level. This would make enforcing the separate parking areas unruly. Ms. Wiehe has said that “More stickers for Seniors and Juniors will be ordered for next year to keep the confusion away.” Once all juniors and seniors have the correctly labeled passes, this will be a potential solution.

Senior Marcy Hickman was asked about the parking difficulty here at Tahoma and she claimed that “I have my mom drop me off at school very often since there isn’t anywhere for me to park in the main lot.” Hickman was then asked if she has ever been late to class solely because of parking and she exclaimed  “Yes! I was actually late to class this morning because I had to turn around from the main lot and go park at the end of the far lot since there were no spots left.”

From a staff perspective, Ms. Weihe has suggested that one way that the parking situation can be alleviated is through decreasing the number of people parking in the far and main lots without a parking pass. She stated that she needs to get out and write more tickets to hopefully help stop that issue.

Hickman also addressed the issue of students with late arrival or Running Start having to park in the far lot almost daily. When Ms. Weihe was asked about this issue she expressed that “ There is a group of students talking with Mr. Duty to see what can be done with that so more to come on that issue.”