As of the start of the 2025-2026 school year, WA will be assigning numbered parking spots to students in the senior parking lot. This policy change was a result of several administrative concerns, and will continue for the foreseeable future.
The school parking lot was already due for a new sealcoating and striping — renovations that were set to take place during the summer of 2025. However, before the process started, School Resource Officer Anthony Bernadin suggested to WA administration the idea of numbering and assigning parking spots. After weighing the advantages and disadvantages of a new system, administration decided to proceed by assigning student-specific spots in the senior parking lot.
Students who had purchased their parking pass before the Senior Welcome Back meeting on Aug. 27 were alphabetized and assigned spots marked by a number starting at one. Students who purchase a pass moving forward are assigned the next available spot down the line.
“At first, I wasn’t in favor of it. But with getting a new seal coat, new stripes, and new numbers, I thought it’d be a good look. I was just in fear of something new, something that you’d have to manage,” Dean Bob Ware said. “[I wasn’t] sure what that entailed, but I know other schools do it, and our parking lot is controlled chaos, and for us to do something where […] we can settle it down and get kids parking in a consistent manner to an assigned spot, I think is gonna have a lot of benefits.”
Several concerns from administration also prompted the switch. Primarily, the spots are intended to allow for quicker identification of students by their cars. This will help determine if missing students are in the building, if non-students or non-seniors are parking in the lot, and which parties may be responsible in an accident.
Furthermore, an incident during the previous school year established a safety issue around miscellaneous parking; after one of the trees lining the parking lot split in half, there was significant concern about an estimated thirty cars being damaged. While the administration did their best to notify students whose vehicles were at risk, tracking down the owner of each car was a difficult task without assigned spots.
“We were trying to run a license plate, see who it belongs to, and then figure out the parent, figure out the child. It was a long process where we’re calling people out of the classroom constantly, and it was a major safety issue,” Bernadin said. “These kids, we know where they are in the building. We should also know where they are outside the building too. And the last frontier was the parking lot.”
This expedited identification process is also meant to lower accident rates within the lot. According to Bernadin’s estimate, there were between 20 to 30 reported accidents last year. This is the first school year in three years to not see an accident within the first week. WA administration’s hope is that, because students will be parking next to the same people, they will be forced to be more accountable as well as mindful of their driving. However, in the case that a scratch or bump is not reported, mandated spots are designed to accelerate the identification of the likely culprit.
Additionally, to further protect the parking seniors, a select few spots in the lot were not assigned to students. These spaces are being withheld in order to make the lot easier to navigate. They are located by entrances where sideswipes are common. With these adjustments, Bernadin hopes students will maintain good driving etiquette and retain their parking passes.
“If students are hitting other cars, we don’t penalize it. It would be their insurance that’s penalizing them. I can’t penalize people for being bad drivers; there are bad drivers everywhere,” Bernadin said. “The school, however, […] would handle [repeat offenders]. Since [the lot] is on town property, they would have the right to take parking passes away, which they can. Based on other reasons too: tardiness, not complying, those types of things.”
The class of 2026 is the first group of students to experience assigned parking at WA, and the seniors have been expressing widely differing opinions. A main point of contention is the fact that students have no control over where their spot is in the lot. Whether it’s having a quick getaway or being next to a friend, the location of students’ spots appears to play a role in their opinion on the new system.
“I think [the assigned spots are] awful. My parking spot is the worst. It took me 20 minutes to get out yesterday. It’s in the middle of the lot. It’s literally so bad. Nobody will let me out. People are pulling through, I can’t reverse,” senior Zadie Murray said. “[…] So I think it’s just not that big of a deal, and they’re fixing problems that don’t need to be fixed, because they’re not problems.”
However, others find the change to be beneficial, with little overall impact on their daily routines.
“I love the new assigned parking because my parking spot is amazing. It’s like three [spaces] away from the exit, so I’ve been guaranteed a perfect spot every time,” senior Maggie Burt said. “Even though sometimes the people next to me park kind of bad, at least I’ll know if they hit me now, so I love it.”
Both Ware and Bernadin note the school’s priorities lie with student safety, and urge students to learn to adapt to this new system.
“Park where you don’t have to back up, try to get here early, be careful, and you don’t always have to leave here right at 2:20. If parking is crazy, stay till 2:30 and then you can easily get out of here,” Ware said. “Be patient. Keep your head up, your eyes on the road, and just understand that you have a lot of kids out there, we don’t want any accidents.”
