11th-grade student Luciana Rojas parks her car in Fresas, the lot where students leave their cars, and walks 15 minutes to the first period. Her car is one of the roughly 30 packed into that space. Despite walking to school daily, she has never been told why she can’t park inside campus.
No student can point to a written policy; what they know is based on what the adults told them when they asked.
“I have asked several Staff members of the school and they have told me that for two reasons we cannot park inside,” said Luciana. “The first one is that we have to be older than 18, and also because in the past we had several incidents so they decided to make us park outside,” Rojas added.
Whatever the reason, the rule stopped feeling temporary a long time ago.
“I have been parking in Fresas since January of this year so around like seven months,” Rojas said.
After seven months, the walk has become a part of her daily routine, but she can still describe her first day of parking in detail.
“The first day I parked in Fresas it was really weird because I had to walk a lot to get to school and to get to my classes so I would like a super tired and exhausted to my class,” Luciana recalled. “I also remembered that I was super scared that I was gonna get robbed or kidnapped because it’s a long walk and there’s nobody from school watching you so it was a bit scary.”
While students experience the ban as a daily trouble, transportation worker Juan Hernandez reveals that the creation of the rule originated from a reckless car accident years ago
“The student didn’t obey; he was behind the person who let him pass, he didn’t obey, and bam, he just ran right past,” explained Juan. “A family was passing by, a mother from Las Palmas school with a little girl, and he ran past them… and the school then said, ““STUDENTS CAN’T BRING CARS.””
The crash shocked the school, so they decided to ban student parking inside campus.
The crash explains why the rule was created. It doesn’t explain why the rule remains, and on that, Juan points somewhere other than the students: limited parking space on campus, where parents, especially during school events, take up most of the parking spots and get priority.
“It’s not just the students, it’s the parents themselves… it’s the cars of the same parents, and there are many of them,” Juan said.
With space already tight inside the school, prioritizing parents and staff leaves no room for student cars, reinforcing the school’s effort to manage its relationship with its surroundings.
“That is why the decision to move the school from Robledo to Alto de las Palmas was not to harm a community but to help the community of Las Palmas,” Juan concluded.