The last bell rings for the school day and the race to the student parking lot ensues. Teachers, students, parents–all about to witness the chaos that is the Lakeview student parking lot after school. 

The student parking lot has always been a busy space after school, but recently it has gotten out of hand. The main reason for this daily headache–inducing traffic jams is because of the amount of parents picking up their high schoolers in the student parking lot. Furthermore, the mass of buses leave the parking lot at 3:00 every day, making some students sit for even longer in order to wait them out. 

Parents have tended to use the side streets in front of the school or the parking lot in front of the shops near the school, but more and more parents have made the switch recently to the student parking lot. “The people don’t understand the order and flow of traffic,” senior Paige Thomas said. “The parents also make it worse because they aren’t paying attention and there’s no room.”

There is a system when it comes to exiting a busy parking lot: one car goes, another merges, one car goes, another merges. However, the same rules do not seem to apply to the Lakeview parking lot. Every day there are horns honked and tires screeched because of the agonizing tension. The parents tend to gain a superiority complex when it comes to the student parking lot and will not let anyone through to exit, extending the wait time to get out. Even when you are able to get through, you may be stopped when the buses have to leave at 3:00, and it takes them about 10 minutes to leave because of how many of them there are.

Sitting bumper to bumper in a parking lot is already frustrating enough, but it is even worse when you have somewhere to be. The pressure to get out quickly is especially important to students who have jobs after school. “It takes me 10-15 minutes to get out of the student parking lot and I have work after school,” senior Carolina Valdez said.

Although the year is almost up, there could possibly still be a solution to the madness after school. Because it is a student parking lot, administrators should propose that parents only pick up either in the parent pick-up line or in front of the school. This would clear out a bunch of the build up of cars and absolve some of the tension in the parking lot. Something else for parents to think about is having their kids be bussed so they do not have to pick them up themselves, relieving some stress. This solution is not realistic for everyone, but many of the students being picked up can ride the bus if needed.

The student parking lot at 2:50 ends the school day on a bad note for many students, and there needs to be actions to change this that will make it all run much smoother.