By AJ Cassapo ‘19, James Mueller ‘19, Adian Guevara ‘20, Corlan Joubert ‘20, Trey Duncan ‘21

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As the Strake Jesuit student body grows year after year, parking spaces have become increasingly limited.

Often, students have difficulty finding a parking space when they arrive at Strake Jesuit after 7:45 A.M., and consequences, such as a PH for tardiness, directly result from this. Students who arrive at 7:45 A.M. or later must search for several minutes to find a spot far away from their first class. If students are in a time crunch, they might decide to park in unauthorized areas such as the faculty or handicapped spots. If caught, students are given a PH, even though they would have missed part of class if they had not parked there.

Additionally, the lack of parking spaces at Strake Jesuit can create safety hazards in the future. For example, not having enough parking spaces will force students to park off campus where accidents are more likely to occur. When St. Agnes was undergoing construction last year, they had to close one of their parking lots, forcing their students to park across the street, where their cars were sometimes backed into or sideswiped by reckless drivers. Without more parking spaces, this will be the reality for our student drivers as well.

To avoid these problems, Strake Jesuit must find a new place to add parking spaces for students.

Where? While we considered transforming smaller spaces, such as the grass medians, to parking zones, we concluded that accommodating all student parking is going to require a larger area to be converted for parking.

The most efficient way to add more parking spots at Strake Jesuit is to convert a third of the rugby field into an additional parking lot. This would create around 200 more parking spaces, and the field space left over would still be larger than a regulation-size rugby field. This is also most cost-effective option, since removing a few fences and grass is cheaper than buying new lots or constructing a parking garage.

Converting a third of the rugby field into a parking lot is the cheapest and fastest way to solve the growing parking-spot issue at Strake Jesuit.