By: Megan Yang
Redwood Student Parking lot is the only parking place that the Visalia Unified School District owns. It has been used for Covid-19 cottages, solar panels, electric vehicle chargers, and also used as a student-parent pick-up/drop-off.
Students have created their own parking spaces, recognizing that the parking lot is overfilled, as well as having complaints about the spacing.
By Rios
Kailynn Rios ’22 says that they had been parking “in between the two handicap spots” and it says “no parking.”
Rios says, “I started parking there and then I noticed some people who got there earlier than me started parking in the same spot.”
A couple weeks go by, where the same thing happens again, but this time being two cones in the “no parking” area.
Rios had told her friend, who was in the car, “to move the cones [because they] needed to park.”
Rios says that “One of the groundskeepers comes up to [her] and says ‘Get out of here, you need to leave,’ but noticing that there is another car parked in the same place, she “got mad… and moved because [she] didn’t want to get in trouble.”
“To this day, that same groundskeeper hates me and will not do anything to talk to me… and I have never parked in that same parking spot again because I was the one who got caught,” says Rios.
Savannah Torres ’23 says the student parking lot “is just too small.”
There’s a lot of speed bumps and “people try to reverse park, but can’t.” Torres says, “I can’t park in the student parking lot… without hitting another car.”
In the morning’s, the guys have this thing where “they all just honk back and forth for 40 minutes straight.”
The student parking lot is almost like “a second hang out spot because it’s where everyone’s friends’ cars are.”
By Abbott
A witness from the honking battle that took place in the student parking lot at lunch says, “There was this one time I was waiting in my friend’s car and the water polo boys started to honk at each other.”
This continued for 5 minutes, until “an administrator came out and told them to stop.”
Jacob Abbott ’24, a first time driver, says that he can only get a spot in the student parking lot because he has a pre-first.
Abbott doesn’t leave for lunch because then “[he’ll] lose [his] spot.”
The only funny thing Abbott has seen is “how bad [his] parking is half the time.”
Megan Yang
Megan Yang ('24) is in her 4th year of Journalism. She is a writer and editor for the News section and enjoys writing for the Redwood Gigantea.
Tags: covid-19, Electric Vehicles, parking, parking problems in school, rangers, Redwood, redwood gigantea, redwood high school, redwood journalism, redwood rangers, rhs, student perspective, studentlife, students, visalia ca
I don’t think this is a parking problem. There are still parking spaces on the island and around the school. I think this is an entitlement problem and a common sense problem. Why do students ignore rules and LAWS and park in the disabled parking and “No Parking” spaces? It is pretty easy, if you are not disabled, you don’t park in disabled parking and if it is marked “No Parking” , you don’t park there.