When I come to school in the morning, I want to be able to easily park and not have to worry about not getting a spot. With a lot of juniors now getting their license, there are very limited parking spots. This can cause a lot of unnecessary stress for students, on top of the stress that already comes along with school. The only solution to this problem now is leaving earlier in the morning, which affects my quality of sleep so there must be another way to ensure parking.

In my interview with 2017 alumni Ashton Manolian, he explains how he had one of the biggest classes in Ipswich High School history. “When I was driving to school as a junior and senior, I never had trouble parking or finding parking. In fact, we never even had to think about it. There were always spots, and I know we were one of the biggest classes that graduated in terms of students.” Now there has to be some sort of explanation for this. He also shares the same feelings about the parking situation as I do, “If I showed up to school and I couldn’t find a parking spot, I would be pretty upset. In fact, I would probably turn around and leave the school parking lot. Not being able to find a parking spot can make any day feel like a Monday.” I completely agree with his statement and Mondays are terrible so no one wants every day to feel like Monday. 

I next went to the man in power, Jonathan Mitchell, and asked him some crucial questions. Seeing as Ashton’s class had 180 and according to Mr. Mitchell, “There are 138 seniors and 126 juniors,” parking should not be a problem for us. He also explains how, “There are federal regulations about what the percentage of a parking lot must be set aside for disabled drivers: for every 25 regular spots, there must be one handicap spot,” Which makes that roughly 150 parking spots. This is clearly not enough to make it so everyone can park. 

Other schools around Ipswich have problems with parking too. Schools such as Triton have assigned parking lots that worked out well for them and students never had a problem with parking. On the other hand, at Newburyport High School the students have to park on side streets just to be able to go to school since there are not enough spots for them all. This has also been a problem for Ipswich High School for years seeing as past members of the Tiger Transcript have written about the same problem in previous years.

As a senior who can drive, I feel that we should get priority for parking spots. Although it may sound unfair to the juniors, they have another whole year at this school and don’t need to drive to school. In order to solve this, I think people should get assigned parking spots, and once every senior has one they then can be raffled out. It is our senior year and I know that I and many other seniors do not enjoy having to worry about parking every morning.