Point: Isaac Cooper

Welcome back from summer break.  It is a new year at RJR, and with that comes routine changes to improve from last year in every way we, as a community can. Among these new changes are beautification of the  the campus and a new parking lot system.

   Eric Puryear,  assistant principal of RJR and an architect of the system, introduced the new changes to make parking a more streamlined and safer process for everyone involved.

   “Last year we [Reynolds administration] felt like we had a lot of incidents in the parking lot,” Puryear said. “We had a couple of accidents…people parking in unauthorized spots. We just wanted to streamline the process… to make it much easier to maintain a safer parking lot.”

   The end result of this streamlining process is numbered parking spots. With numbered parking spots, students who park in the student lots have assigned spots to park in, in co-ordiancance with their schedule. This co-ordinance is applied to two lots: gold and black–the former being for students who are dual enrolled at Career Center and the latter for students who attend RJR all day.  However, this system can be foiled as junior Jack Hubbard has experienced.

   “It’s kind of out of your control,” said Hubbard.

   What Hubbard is referring to is the problem of people not parking in their assigned number spot.  When people do this, the system does become disjointed, as one person not parking in their spot sets off a domino effect of other people not parking in their spots, resulting in disgruntled students and flustered faculty.

   However, we need a new system to help administration monitor students.

   “It just makes it easier for us to identify students… Before [this year], we didn’t know who was parked where, who was driving what, it was not a good system,” Puryear said.

   In prior years, the parking lot system was first come, first serve.  This system worked, but was not efficient. Its inefficiency was evident in people consistently parking their cars in hazardous areas that did not host legitimate parking spots like fire lanes and the grassy areas of our lot. Moreover, this overpopulation of the parking lot made the 3:35-4:00 parking lot traffic insufferable. In other words, the system was broken.

   Yes, less people can park in the lots this year, but in exchange we get a safer parking process for student drivers that has already exemplified itself within the beginning days of the school year.

   “So far we don’t see as many unauthorized vehicles…If they [students] leave, and they weren’t supposed to leave we can easily go look at [our] spreadsheet to say ‘Hey, you weren’t supposed to be off campus, yet you left campus,’” Puryear said.

  If you are someone who has been snubbed a spot from this system, or find people parking in your spot all the time: just follow the policy.  I get it–I don’t have a parking spot myself. However, the logic behind the system is there and it is already delivering on some of its promises helping students like junior Alyssa McMillan have a better parking experience.

   “I think it’s better… they should have had it the years before… You [have] a designated spot and nobody can park in it,” McMillan said.

Counterpoint: Liam Sherman

A parking pass; something that every student hopes to have. It gives you the freedom to arrive at school as close to the starting bell as possible and leave as soon as the day ends. This year though, the familiar first come first park system at Reynolds has been replaced with a new, more complicated system: assigned spaces.

   The administration put this system in place to try and prevent some of the chaos that students have felt with parking in years past.

   “Over the last few years I’ve always heard complaints from students about the chaos that’s in the parking lot, especially for instance chaos at the career center, but there’s always been chaos here and nobody having spots they could be assured of being able to park in. As such, I think that having the stickers and having assigned parking spots in the long run will be a good thing. Its chaotic now as everyone’s trying to sort it out,” Reynolds science teacher Erik Findeis said.

   The new assigned parking space system has been a big change for Reynolds students, upperclassmen in particular. Gone are the days of rushing from career center to get a good parking spot. Bygone is the time of the senior lot sophomores and juniors anticipated using. This has been replaced with a system that many people don’t fully grasp and that has caused understandable confusion in the first couple weeks of school.

   One of the main problems that people have in the parking lot is that if one person parks in the wrong spot, it causes a chain reaction. Since one person misparked, the owner of the spot then has to mispark, and so on and so forth until a great many people are angry and in the wrong spots. When this happens students are supposed to go to the office to report the car occupying their place, but many do not because they are rushing to class or do not want to deal with the hassle.

       “In theory [the parking plan] could work if everyone parked in their space but if one person doesn’t park in their space, it messes everything up,” junior Katie Nicholls said. “I’ve only been able to park in my assigned parking space about three or four times.”

   This has lead to an issue of students receiving tickets or ‘ready to tow’ stickers, simply because someone else was not courteous or was forced into taking their spot. The school is attempting to remedy this issue, though.

   “When we [ticket a car] we go check the right spot to see exactly what the chain reaction is and as such there is no harm no foul,” Findeis said.

   Many issues that students, including myself, have with the new parking system boil down to issues of a few people not understanding what to do or choosing to ignore the new system all-togeather. This has caused some confusion and frustration in the early weeks of school. But like any new system eventually people will get used to it. Over time issues will smooth themselves out as students and faculty recognize existing problems and work to solve them.

   While I personally prefer the old parking system, the new one does have benefits such as assuring people spots and penalizing people who take up multiple spots (which I saw plenty of last year). While in the short term the new parking system has issues that need to be worked out, in the long run it has the potential to improve on many flaws in the old system.

Photo Provided by Creative Commons