Lewis-Palmer High School has a student parking lot on the south side of the building, that students can park in if they buy a parking pass that start at $85 in September and go down to $15 in May. According to Sandi Brandl, the principal at Lewis-Palmer High School, all of the money the school gets from parking passes go into a separate account so that the money can be saved to help keep the parking lot in good condition, make sure the lights are working and keep the cameras up to par.  

“We have a tight budget and do not have the money right now to repave the parking lot. Since the entire parking lot needs to torn up and to be paved completely, it would take about $500,000 to pave the entire lot,” Brandl said.

Over the past couple of years, all the rain, snow and general weathering have made the potholes worse. The back road that goes right behind Lewis-Palmer High School was paved fairly recently and just that road was $35,000. The increasing amount of potholes in the Lewis-Palmer High School student parking lot has become a lot worse since this Colorado has had this harsh winter and it has really wreaked havoc on the parking lot. The conditions of the parking lot have also affected the cars that are parked there.

“I have to drive since I live in Castle Rock. I have no other option to get to school so I have to park my car in the parking lot every day. My suspensions are really bad now and my back bumper has pretty much been knocked loose,” Tucker Miller, 10, said.

Other students like Brooke Taylor, 11, also have to park their car in the parking lot every day because that is their mode of transportation to and from school. She believes the parking lot is not awful and that since it is a student parking lot, the conditions are expected but that they should be fixed.

“The conditions are kind of expected, but I don’t think we should have to pay almost $100 for a parking pass. If we have to pay at all it should be a lot less. I have not personally had any problems due to the potholes, but I know it is bad on tires and the conditions are just really unsafe being that it is filled with high school student drivers. Student drivers sometimes go out on a limb and are not very careful while driving because they do not know what they are doing,” Taylor said.
Although the pot holes and the condition of the student parking lot has gotten a lot worse since the beginning of the school year and budgets are tight, the parking lot is scheduled to be fixed this summer. Whether or not the Lewis-Palmer student parking lot is actually going to be fixed, students will have to wait to see in the fall.