The parking passes have changed from being assigned to not assigned. In past years students were assigned to certain parking lots, compared to now with students being able to park freely in any parking lot they want.
Principal Dr. Sean DeMaree says that the new change is to help motivate students to get to school on time because there is still a substantial amount of students showing up late.
“Selfishly, I want all our students to get here on time. We’re all struggling with that. [We have] about 70 kids a day, who are coming to school [at] eight o’clock instead of 7:40. And part of the motivation is, get here early, get a better parking spot,” DeMaree said.
Senior Julia Hester is worried that if she comes late she will have to park in a different parking spot.
“I feel like if I come late to school and I can’t park in A lot, I’ll be mad,” Hester said.
If the new policy doesn’t end up working, the administration already has a backup plan.
“Typically, we try to give things a full school year before we make any major changes. And often we actually try to go to three school years before we make any major changes, just to give time for things to work,” DeMaree said.
DeMaree says that the process of changing plans typically has three steps, and it can be a challenge for changes to actually make an impact.
“That first year, a lot of the challenges you face are actually just people just trying to learn the new system. Then the next year is where you’re seeing if it’s working or not,” DeMaree said.
By May, if the new policy doesn’t end up working out, the administration will start making changes.
“We would go back to the old system of assigning parking spots. And actually we’d probably go further last year. We’d actually go the other direction. Instead of open parking, we would do closed parking. So you would have spot B 11 be your parking spot, and if anyone parks in that spot, then we would potentially tow them,” DeMaree said.
Senior Cameron Talcott thinks that the new policy has made the traffic in the morning worse than last year’s traffic.
“I think it makes it a little bit more difficult just in the morning, but it’s not too bad,” Talcott said.
Yet, DeMaree says that the traffic in the morning is due to parents driving through the parking lot to get over to Heritage Elementary School.
“They have a bridge that goes out onto Lindenwood, but that bridge is gone right now. So Heritage is using our parking lot. The only way to get to Heritage Elementary School right now is to drive through Olathe South,” DeMaree said. “And so some of the traffic problems we’ve seen, especially after school, have been the Heritage parents.”
Another issue with the traffic is the fact that our parking lot is too small, and does not fit the amount of student drivers that we have.
“South was built in 81, and the parking lot then was actually bigger than it currently is. Because the parking lot used to be where we’re currently sitting in my office today. So when they moved freshmen up from junior high school to high school in 2010. They had to add to the building which made our parking even smaller,” DeMaree said.
However, DeMaree found that in the past year, the number of students we have has been shrinking, which seems to help the parking situation.
“The neighborhoods that are around us are a log of families whose kids have grown up and are in college. Or beyond, and then just not a lot of young families moving in,” DeMaree said. “Last year we had around 1840 students, this year we’re around 1791 students.”
Overall, according to DeMaree, the parking issues are not any worse than the other high schools in the district.
“I actually feel pretty lucky,” DeMaree said. “[The other schools] seem to have almost an accident every day. And here it’s really not that bad. Our students do a pretty good job of paying attention and driving carefully through the parking lot.”
