As you drive up to school in the morning, the last thing you want to be greeted with is traffic. Unfortunately, you will likely see a traffic jam as you drive up to Lakewood High School’s parking lot. This is everyday life for most students at our school. Between 7:40 and 8:05, you can catch long lines through the front of our high school, sometimes even affecting the surrounding streets. Can we solve this issue?
“If we had more accessible entrances, more people could make it on time,” said freshman Nina Dang. “I wasn’t late to school last year, and now it’s super frustrating that I am.”
This heavily affects our community, preventing us from getting to school and class on time, but could the solution be in our hands? “I do think it’s more of a time management thing, if you get here around 7:35 there’s much less of a line,” says Lakewood High School principal Joy Morgan who believes it is a simple issue most of us could fix in minutes.
Nina Dang adds to this saying, “I don’t think there’s much we can do, we might just have to learn how to adapt.”
This might be something few people agree with though, since freshman Josie Palmieri believes that this is something that the school should work on. “If we get more guards to check IDs, we can have multiple entrances that we can go through which would make the line much shorter.”
This is an unlikely option according to Mrs. Morgan stating that “Safety and security is our main priority so opening up different entrances could spread our staff so we wouldn’t have security guards checking who is coming in.”
Another big issue with the school morning traffic is the weather, especially since we’re coming up on winter when many people won’t be able to walk to school, so they will have to get a ride.
“The only time I am late to school is when the weather is rainy,” Palmieri said, which is something that Mrs. Morgan is working on.
“Usually on rainy or snowy days, there is an excess backup of traffic, which is when we excuse being late,” Morgan said.
However, with 1300 kids and more coming next year when LHS and Franklin School of Opportunity combine, the traffic could become much worse since we will have less space. Across from the high school, there’s a parking area called the North Lot. At the beginning of the year, students could buy parking in all but the first two rows which were for staff only, but Mrs. Morgan has changed this.
“The North Lot is all student parking besides the first two rows which were used for staff, we’ve extended the North Lot once this year and released another row for the students. Staff usually doesn’t use all of the first row either. So in maybe a month or two, we’ll take a look and see if we can release an additional 10 or so parking spots,” said Morgan.
There have been multiple attempts to extend student parking throughout this school year. With the space our school has, Mrs. Morgan has put the students first and has done a lot to ensure students arrive on time.
“If we had a busing system more people would get to school on time,” added Dang. But this is very unlikely since it’s not under our school’s control.
For now, there’s no permanent solution for our traffic crisis. Waking up earlier and getting to school around 7:35 could be the best solution for many, as well as skipping the line completely and walking on nice days.
