Parking Culture of Authority

By Tetyana Stayura

Most people who go to a restaurant, go shopping or even go to a church prefer to find the closest parking spot available. All employees at the given places are required to park at the furthest spots to allow customers to park closer and give them a better experience. At a high school setting, the teachers are employees and the students compare to “customers” as they only stay at the high school for four years. However, compared to employees of other businesses, the teachers receive parking spots--for free--that are the closest rather than students, who pay for their opportunity to park.

One of the choices many students at Elk Grove High School face is whether to purchase a parking pass, which allows you to park closer to the school, or park at a further available parking lot, which is at least a four minute walk.  Many of the lucky students, like me, are able to purchase the $200 parking pass. However, most of us don't know that the spots we get are further than the ones the teachers get. There are no parking spots reserved for any students therefore every morning all of the spots are first come first serve. Many of the students will come to a disappointment when they are only able to find an available spot in the last two rows of a smaller parking lot or the far left of the larger one. The biggest disappointment, however, comes when they realize that the closest spots were taken by teachers. Considering that the teachers already have the closest spots available in both parking lots, it is bewildering as to why they would take some of the closest spots that are available to students. Both of the parking lots come with preinstalled rows of parking for teachers, which are marked by white lines, whereas the rest that are for students are marked in yellow. Elk Grove has a total of 676 parking spaces where ten are for the handicapped and six are reserved for buses which leaves 452 spots for students and 208 for teachers. The penalty for the students who park in the teacher’s spots varies from loss of the parking pass with no refund, car towed - at owner’s expense-, or a detention. The problem many students have with that rule is that the teachers don’t have a similar penalty for parking in the students’s spots.

Some might argue that teachers are unaware of the policy that the spots are color coded.  Nonetheless, students are informed of this rule which is included in a packet they receive when they purchase their parking pass. The staff also faces a problem with the fact that this year, there 240 staff members at Elk grove, 32 more members than staff therefore requiring them to utilize student spots. Why do students get more consequences for parking in a wrong spot when teachers are more likely to do it and still face no consequences? The solution for this problem is an easy one. The school either penalizes both the students and teachers equally or gets rid of it’s penalties.