Every May, in the auditorium, juniors take their chance at obtaining a coveted parking pass. For many, their commute options for next year depend entirely on a random lottery. Those whose names are called will have a guaranteed place to park from September to May. While those who don’t get a pass may entirely forget the possibility of parking at school, others get creative when looking for options. Some of these creative alternatives include packing the adjacent streets, obtaining a two hour pass from the township, and–most boldly–parking on LM’s property without a pass.
The Kobe Bryant Gym parking lot is effectively the ‘senior parking’ lot. For most of the year, students with a pass would park there with no problem. Simultaneously, seniors without passes have discreetly parked in the back lot, the one next to Butcher Field. According to Kajsa Borgelt ’26, “It started with just a few cars in the back lot but, as the year progressed and the weather got worse, I would get to school and notice only a few spots open.” It was a widely known secret of sorts: seniors who were unfortunate enough to not obtain a pass would park in the back lot and the campus aides would not take notice. But, as Borgelt notes, as the “open secret” spread a new problem arose: juniors. According to some disgruntled seniors, juniors are a major fracture in the already fragile parking ecosystem. As senior Sophie Thomas ’26 explains, “If the juniors didn’t park back there, then it would be no problem for all the seniors.” But it’s not only in the unsanctioned back lot where juniors started to park, as Joe O’Gara ’26 claims some juniors are audacious enough to park “every morning and take up multiple spots in the Kobe Parking Lot, the de facto senior lot.”
On February 26, Alex Jackson ’26, a student with a parking pass, drove into the Kobe Parking Lot looking for a spot. When he found that all the spots were filled, eager to get to his classes, Jackson parked on Owen Road, which earned him a thirty dollar ticket. Zach Snyder ’26, another student with a parking pass, ran into a similar predicament. With the Kobe lot being full, he parked in the administration lot, unknowingly taking the superintendent’s parking spot. This led to an unprompted message on the announcements asking for a student to move their car from the lot.
Undoubtedly, students with parking passes like Jackson and Snyder feel slighted at this anarchic parking free-for-all, but for some students parking without a pass isn’t a malicious ambush but one of necessity. As many students point out with vehement annoyance, when LM was renovated in 2010, rather than finding creative solutions to create parking for a large number of students, they only created one student lot. To further fuel this anger, cross-town rivals at Harriton High School have enough parking spaces for all juniors and seniors to park. While these grievances are targeted towards the administration, admittedly they are not totally at fault, the parking dilemma at LM is also a product of geographic circumstance. Unlike Harriton High School, located in a more sparsely populated part of the township, LM’s location is in the heart of the township’s commercial and government centers. Less than a mile from both Suburban Square and Narberth’s commercial Haverford Avenue, the area surrounding LM is not just densely populated but also heavily trafficked especially on a morning commute. No matter what the administration could have planned for the 2010 renovation, the geographic area of LM would remain the same.
Even with uncontrollable circumstances, the administration has started to crackdown nonetheless. On February 26, several students were confronted after school in the Back Lot as they started to depart from school. Alex France ’26 was stopped by a campus aide he’s “never seen before” and was asked for a student ID. When France responded that he did not have his, the aide asked for his drivers license, took note of it and then took a picture of his license plate before letting him drive off the premises. France and other students were later punished with the loss of their free periods for two weeks and a lunch detention. Other students, like Thomas, explained that they found a bright orange sticker on their windshield reading “WARNING”––a foreboding sign of the administration’s new attitude towards students who dare to take the risk.
While there’s not a singular issue that proves that the parking situation at LM needs reform: seniors who should be enjoying their final year now have the stress of finding a spot, juniors who are struggling under the weight of harsh academics now have the anxiety of evading campus aides, and the administration itself have to now levy resources towards parking restrictions. Whoever you are,we can all agree that something needs to be done to ensure both student happiness and administrative quota.
