Logan Harrison

Starting next school year, parking passes will be on a semester basis where students get to drive to school every day during the entirety of either first or second semester. In the past, most parking passes have been on an every other day basis, meaning a student was able to drive to school half of the time, on either an “even” or an “odd” day, depending on the date. While the amount of days students are able to park in their designated spot is not changing, the organization of passes is.  North implemented this because they thought it would complement the school and students schedules better than in previous years. 

“In this particular system, moving to the semester parking is partly because there has been some confusion about what an odd and even day is,” said Andrew Herrera, dean of students. “Hopefully we can get it to the point where you’re parking for a whole semester. There’s more continuity with that, and there’s less questioning, ‘am I supposed to park this day?’”

However, some students are not happy about the upcoming changes and are worried it will be inconvenient and more difficult to deal with than the current system. 

“I think [the new system will make it] way harder for people to carpool, and it makes you rely a lot more on other people having available schedules to be able to drive you to and from school if you’re relying on them for the entire semester,” said Addie Haan, junior. “It’s not good for people who play sports, because you’ll have to get a ride every day [after practice].”

When applying for a parking pass, students get to state a preference for which semester they would like a pass for, depending on activities, carpooling or any situation that would warrant a preference. The staff are working hard to honor those preferences, but not everyone will get their first choice. 

“[We are] giving students the opportunity to communicate a preference. Obviously, there’s a lot of contributing factors and logistics to how we assign parking, and so we want to do our best to abide by student preferences, but there’s no guarantee that a student preference will be selected, and the location in the lot is truly a lottery system. It’s completely randomized,” said assistant principal of student life Rebecca La Porta.

In addition to the per-semester passes, some students can get an everyday pass, which means they have a designated spot everyday for the entire school year. This remains the same from years past. These yearly passes are first given to students who take off campus classes that do not provide transportation to and from the school or have special reasons why they would need this pass. It is then given out to seniors on a lottery system basis.  

“If you’re doing our nursing program, then that would be a case [for an everyday pass]. Or if you’re dual credit, if you have classes at ECC and North, those are automatics [for daily parking passes],” said Herrera.

The deadline for applying for a parking pass has also moved up from previous years. Applications are now due on the last day of school, in hopes of making the process of assigning and receiving parking passes easier for students and staff alike. 

“We’ve been getting a lot of feedback, like how can we try and make this more consistent? So the semester idea would help with that. And how can we make the application process a little bit more accessible to students? So moving up the deadline can help with that, because we’re physically here to help you and families,” said La Porta.