Nishant Thangada ‘19, Jonathan Huang ‘19: With the kickoff of the new schedule and the various safety concerns surrounding its structure, Episcopal has instated a new parking system designed to keep students from illegally leaving campus.
Cheryl Mclauchlan, V Form Dean, elaborates, “Every student is assigned a numbered spot. Faculty do not have numbered spot. So if you have a numbered spot as a student, you have to be in it. Your car has to be registered for that spot. If you’re here for homeroom, and your car is no longer here at ten o’clock, you’ve got a problem.”
Addressing the safety concerns, Head of Security Joe Shanahan explains, “The summer going into the year, we knew we were going into a new schedule and [students] were going to have more downtime. Historically, we’ve seen cases where kids were leaving campus at different times of day and they aren’t necessarily seniors, or you’d see them up the street or in one of the stores.” Another safety issue regards the fact that the faculty, with the old parking system, often did not know how many students drove themselves to school.
Head of Upper School Mike Letts adds, “We definitely need better information about how many kids drive to school. We already know how many kids come on the bus and how many come with a parent, but in the past we did not have an understanding of how many kids were driving themselves. From a safety perspective, this is a much better system because it helps us to know where students are if there is some sort of emergency. If we do not know if a student is off-campus, we may think that he/she is still in a building or an unsafe situation. This helps us because if a parking spot is empty then we know that the student is not here.”
The switch to the new schedule, featuring extended classes and longer frees, also played a vital role in the parking situation. Samuel Willis, VI Form Dean, elaborates, “The benefit for me as a dean is that I have a better sense on an hourly basis of where students are during the day, particularly as we move to the new schedule with students who have two to three hours free in a row. In the past [students] might have an hour to leave campus, but now they have several hours to leave campus.” He continues, “We heard rumors last year of sophomores and juniors leaving campus illegally during the day, so part of this is to enforce school rules. In the past [the parking system] was too loose. This is a step in the right direction though I’m not sure it is the best and final solution to make sure kids are safe and that they are parking where they should park, though it is definitely better than what we had.”
The new system has at times come under fire from students who are frustrated with their less than ideal parking spots. Typically, before spaces were assigned, seniors would park in the bottom right corner of the lot across from the Campus Center, while juniors and sophomores would park on the opposite end so that it was a shorter walk to their lounges in the Upper School. Due to the selection process, some seniors ended up with parking spaces in former junior area, resulting in a longer walk to the senior lounge. Elle Ruggiero ‘18 says, “My spot is really far from the Campus Center. It’s fine right now but I’m sure when it gets colder I won’t like the long walk to the Campus Center as much.”
Despite the stricter enforcement of the new parking rules, Letts asserts that the goal was to create a situation that is safer for students rather than simply another restriction. “The drawbacks are that we are not particularly interested in constantly making new rules for students to follow. We want to have a good relationship where students understand and respect the rules in place and that they are there for a reason. It could be that we don’t have enough spots for students to park on-campus, though we have not seen that yet. My hope is that we will have enough spots so that seniors and juniors, if they want to drive, will be able to park. It may be that, by default, sophomores can’t drive. Maybe it isn’t such a bad thing to give only juniors and seniors this privilege.”