by Caleb Peter

With a construction crew at the high school, everything is changing up, including a beloved parking lot. Light poles will be added around the parking lot and space will be needed for the construction crew. Now a majority of the freshmen, sophomore, and junior class have to park in the grass near the softball field, while seniors park in the spaces left in the old parking lot. The underclassmen are worried that the grass parking lot will turn into a disastrous swamp by the end of the year.

Freshman Jay Meinders said, “I hate it, I have to park in the mud. My shoes get muddy.”

Many other students have the same feelings as Meinders. Students have had to drive through the mud to get in and out of the parking lot, and it’s getting harder to avoid stepping in the mud. According to a recent poll, out of 192 students, 112 of them were “not confident at all” that the parking lot would last until the end of the year. Principal Scott Bridges thinks that it depends on what kind of spring PCM has.

Bridges said, “If we have a dry spring, I 100-percent think we’ll be fine. If it gets wet, no, I don’t think it will last until the end of the school year.”

Many students are confused why they can’t just go back to the old parking lot because no one is using it yet. The exact date of when the construction will begin is unknown.

Bridges said, “I had anticipated them starting already. Their construction project manager told me they were going to be started by now, so we got the block cleared out for them to do it. I’m anticipating they’ll be starting any minute.”

There aren’t many other alternatives to this parking lot.  One option is to have students carpool to school. Another options is parking out on old Highway 163, but Bridges thought it could run the risk of a student getting hit, and old Highway 163 doesn’t have enough space for all of the students to park.

Bridges said, “One option was to put gravel out there in the parking lot, but that was going to cost a considerable amount of money. That wouldn’t be a good use of taxpayers’ dollars, unless the gravel was repurposed or reusable for some other reason, which we’ve not really been able to determine that.”

As of now, the future is unclear. Whether or not the parking lot will be a swamp or not depends on whether this spring will be dry or wet. The best a student could do now to help out the parking lot is to drive carefully and avoid spinning their tires in the mud.