Students have been avoiding the tickets in the Olympia High School parking lot. The main reason behind this is their lack of a parking pass, some of whom didn’t even know they existed.
The staff at Olympia High School has recently started enforcing the rules regarding student parking. Staff members have been spotted roaming the lot and placing not a ticket, but a warning for one.
The reason for the warning is the school’s policy on having a parking pass. A parking pass is a sticker that students are required to have on their car window to park in the school lot. However, students treat this more as a suggestion. According to Tamara Liska, security staff at OHS, less than 25% of cars actually have this pass.
Students are advised to have these parking passes for safety reasons. By registering for a pass, the staff can identify both the car and its driver. As Liska explained, this means that“if there was an accident, car lights left on–if you got sick and had to leave your car here,” the school could contact the responsible parties.
It can also be used for identifying students who are parking in prohibited areas. These include the fire lane, the bus drop-off and the grass. Nonetheless, the school will act quite quickly in the event of improper use of disabled parking.
When the parking lot gets full, drivers tend to use “alternative parking spots” because they refuse to park further away from the school in a legitimate spot, with the reason being the long walk. The school threatened to give these tickets out in an attempt to mitigate that. Next year the school is “going to go to a universal sticker,” Liska explained. These universal stickers will last indefinitely and not need to be renewed each year.
These students might not have even known about these passes, though. There is no information on the official school website and students are not immediately aware of this. To fix this they plan on using the morning announcements to inform the student body regarding the sticker policy.
