Image courtesy of Unsplash.
As the College begins what it hopes to be a banner spring semester, many students with cars fear a return of the endless parking tickets that dominated the fall semester. During the fall semester , it was reported by Mary Savage, Head of Campus Safety, that Campus Safety had given out over 1000 parking tickets, which, according to my estimations, would result in approximately $50,000 worth of parking tickets distributed to students. Mary Savage did not respond to questions asking how these statistics compared to other semesters in recent years.
This money then goes to the college’s general fund. It is important that we know exactly how it will be used. Rather than to a general fund for the College, perhaps it can go towards more security measures to end the epidemic of voyeurism on our campus
Another issue that must be raised is the timing that students are allowed to park in faculty and staff lots. Setting the arbitrary time of 2:30 AM for students to move their cars out of administration and faculty is illogical. It is very unreasonable to assume that many employees, if any at all, are showing up to campus at 2:30 in the morning and require all parking spots designated for faculty and staff to be cleared. Setting a later cutoff time for students to vacate faculty and staff parking, such as 7 AM, while also creating a designated number of spots that are only open to faculty/staff/administration 24/7 would create more than enough time for students to get up in the morning and move their cars before employees begin coming onto campus, and athletes to bring their cars down to the Athletic Center in the morning, freeing up parking spaces.
There have also been several reports of Campus Safety ticketing students in lots on weekends or between the hours of 5 PM and 2:30 AM on weekdays, when they are allowed to park there. Andrea Higgins ‘22 was recently ticketed within the 5-2:30 AM parking allowance and spoke to one of the tow truck company people, who said that “they try and wait 1-2 hours until the College calls again because they genuinely feel bad for how often they are called to tow cars.” If the very people who are supposed to be making a profit off of towing our cars are finding what the College is doing is ridiculous, then when will the College learn that putting this unneeded added stress on students involving their cars is only hindering our ability to succeed.
This feeling of chaotic disarray surrounding the parking situation can also be shown when many athletes returned to campus early for practice and were able to park their cars in staff lots they wouldn’t often be able to, as there was little to no faculty working on site. Once the semester was soon to start, however, Campus Safety was quick to give tickets on a Friday night.
Rather than the school sending out an email asking students to move their cars before the end of the weekend when people began moving in, they immediately decided to ticket students without warning for something they were allowed to do for over a month.
Although this has largely been a critical piece, I’d like to leave this article with an uplifting anecdote, where a student’s car was about to be towed from Ridges on a Saturday night. The student asked the tow truck driver how much money it would take for him to not tow the car, to which the driver said somewhere around $80. Rather than leaving their fellow Camel behind, many people around began chipping in whatever money and spare change they had brought down with them on a Saturday night for this student to not get his car towed. This fostering of community not by the college but by its students is what makes Conn truly a remarkable school to be a part of. Although its students and many faculty can pride themselves on setting an ideal of “no man left behind”, I hope that the leaders of the college can do the same soon.
