The Columbus School board and committee have stated that students are not allowed to drive a vehicle inside the school’s campus, after a series of unfortunate events that turned the tables and lead to imposed restrictions. “I overslept and missed the bus, so I drove my car to school… late, stressed out, and mad at myself, I decided to park inside [TCS campus],” Santiago Garcia, TCS student, said. Already being a controversial topic inside the community, driving inside the school’s campus is all that’s being talked about and many students don’t know the real reasons why this rule exists. Well-founded, strong arguments prove this rule to be effective, after all, it was made to save lives.

To save lives? You might be asking, and yes, indeed. TCS wrote this rule after the number of people who suffered accidents either crashing their car or being hit by a late student sprinting to school. According to El Espectador, “the road [Las Palmas]-heavily transited by cars and motorcycles- has become one of the most dangerous roads in the city.” This is sufficient enough reason for the school to worry about. Vicky Jaramillo tells a story about how a person died after he needed emergency surgery and the Doctors were not able to get there in time only because a Student blocked the way with his awfully parked car. It’s no coincidence that the school has strict sanctions and disciplinary measures for driving a vehicle inside the school’s facilities, it’s their [TCS] responsibility to protect us and others around them.

Additionally, the “no driving to school” rule was also written for the community outside the school walls. Students were, unfortunately, harming the “palmas community” (to give it a name) when they sprinted to school in their cars. “A kid and his mother were hit by a student who was driving late to school. The damage inflicted was extremely serious, fatal…” Vicky Jaramillo, said. We as TCS students need to understand why this rule was written, and to fully comprehend its significance we need to remember the value of life. On a different note, the number of parking spots in the school is simply not enough. Teachers, directives, and others who also utilize these parking spots make it impossible for students to also make use of them, and with the ongoing constructions in the school there’s less space for parking spots to be built.

TCS’s “manual de convivencia” states that driving a vehicle inside the school’s facilities is considered to be a grave misconduct, and sometimes even more than that. To drive a car inside the school you need to be of legal age and have a permission to do so majorly in special events, not a normal school day. All these restrictions constitute a bigger role that was made specifically for welfare. Nowadays accidents involving TCS students have declined to the point where we don’t hear about them anymore, and that, proves the effectivity of the rule.