To the editor
It is rather ridiculous that students have to pay a large biannual fee to park at our own school.
Parking is considered to be a "privilege" to seniors at Hillsborough High School. The current price of parking is a biannual payment of $35 and not all students have the wonderful opportunity of paying due to the lack of spots.
However, those that are lucky enough to obtain a parking permit for the full year, need to dish out $70.
Now, this may not seem like much, but to students this is a big deal.
It could buy me about three tanks of gas, or a good number of lunches.
Although there are valid reasons we are charged for parking, such as the permits that need to be printed and the salary of the parking attendant, $70 a year per student is a rather excessive amount.
Now, if every student spot were to be filled, which falls around four hundred spots, at $70 that amount comes to $28,000. First issue at stake, the stickers produced cannot cost more than $2 a piece which still leave us at $27,200, which is quite a bit of excess income.
We do however have a parking attendant that, of course, deserves some type of pay. However, her job is really limited to checking to make sure there is no one parking where they shouldn’t. She also makes sure students have parking permits, as well as handle warnings and issuing tickets for such offenses.
Somehow I do not see that her salary for such a task should be all the approximate intake from all the students pay for parking, which is roughly around $27,000 for the year, a little outrageous in my eyes. There is no other real cause the money is going towards as far as the student body has been informed of.
We don’t have any type of security guarding our cars and they are claiming no responsibility to any damage to our cars that occurs in the parking lot. So where is all that money going? And yet another question is at stake. If we have to pay for our parking rights why aren’t the teachers being charged?
Well, going to school is also a job and a responsibility and the students are still charged for parking. It is not that I have a problem paying for my permit, I understand there are costs involved but all in all it seems to be an unfair situation where everyone is left in the dark of where their money is going.
If students were informed of exactly where the money was going, I am sure they would feel much better about it, or at least understand why there is a need for such a large payment and stop their complaining.
Hillsborough High School