Outside The Lines: Students continue to face issues in the parking lot due to lack of spaces and still receive parking tickets

East students have become frustrated with the increase of traffic and ticketing and the lack of parking during second semester.

There’s been a recent increase in tickets after administrators started checking the parking lot weekly or more according to Associate Principal Kristoffer Barikmo. This has been especially prevalent among sophomores who use the lot off of 75th Street.

Barikmo walks around the parking lot at least once a week to make sure all of the students are parked in their approved spots. However, students parking without a permit has been an issue at East for years, according to Barikmo.

“[Parking has] always been a significant problem,” Barikmo said. “We’ve got 575 parking spots and we’ve got far more than 575 people that have the ability to drive to school. So we’ll always have a major parking issue on campus.”

According to sophomore Christian Shaw, sophomores are parking in the reserved parking lots which causes a domino effect of students with parking permits not finding spots that are supposed to be guaranteed.

Shaw got a ticket for parking in the junior lot after being late to school and not being able to find a spot in the sophomore lot.Shaw hopes that sophomores will be able to purchase passes next year. 

“I had to park there because I was 15 minutes late after I slid out on ice and stopped on a hill,” Shaw said.

According to Barikmo, the best case scenario would be if East was able to build a parking garage.

“I would love to be able to add more spots” Barikmo said “I’d love to build a parking garage because we’d have the ability then to serve the amount of students that need parking spaces.”

Senior Ayden Beveridge-Calvin also thinks that the parking system is flawed since he wasn’t able to purchase a permit as an upperclassman because the school ran out even though there were still spots open because he got his license in November and was late to apply.

“I just had to park illegally when I was a junior because there were no spots and [administration] wouldn’t sell me a pass even though there were 20 spots open at all times,” Beveridge-Calvin said.

Barikmo says that due to the limited number of spots, receiving a parking pass is for upperclassmen only because they are top priority. 

“To people that are freshmen or sophomores, if you plan to drive to school, you’re doing that knowing that we can never guarantee you a place to park on or near campus,” Barikmo said. “You [have] got to wake up early and you got to get to school early.”

Senior Connor Bykowski, the head of the parliamentary committee — the board that decides whether or not to approve the appeal of the tickets — encourages students to contact the committee if they are struggling with tickets.

All students have the right to appeal their ticket if they received one. In order to appeal you can either email Bykowski or scan a QR code that takes you to the appeal form after you submit the form you get an email specifying the date/and time of the meeting.

“If you receive a parking ticket and believe that there is a valid reason you should not be fined, then you should appeal,” Bykowksi said.“I cannot guarantee that the appeal will go anywhere as the staff is very important to the school and making sure that they have parking is very important to both the student court, the administration and the student body,” 

According to Bykowski, one of the most common reasons students appeal tickets is when they drive another vehicle that is not theirs and receive a ticket because they don’t have a pass.

East isn’t alone with parking issues as students at Shawnee Mission South complain about their system as well. South senior Kara Lorenz says their issues are more about the design of the parking lot.

“The parking lot at my school is designed very poorly,” Lorenz said. “They added a bunch of islands and took out parking. They made it so much harder to get out of the parking lot.”

South’s issues can’t be solved with policy, but East senior Ayden Beveridge-Calvin has ideas about how the East lot could improve, including more exits added to prevent traffic. Ideally, these exits would be by the Mission road entrance/exit, making the entrance and exit two separate points.