Senior Speculations on Painting Senior Parking Spots

While talking to many high schoolers through BHS, I learned that many do not know that seniors used to be able to paint their parking spots.

A teacher of Brownsburg and a past BHS student has recently debated that not being able to paint the senior lot was because of the cost of asphalt. “I truly do not know exactly why they have gotten rid of painting senior parking spots. I assume it was because of the cost. Repainting asphalt every year can be timely and expensive,” teacher Shannon Walmoth said.

Curiously, but cautiously, I have gone around the school looking for answers on why this event has disappeared throughout the years. While my speculations led me to believe that it was the cost of the asphalt, there were a multitude of possible reasons. As many of us know, students do not make high wages at high school-level jobs. Buying things can become a problem for many, but not being able to find a parking spot in the morning before school can be even more tiring.

“I’m more upset because we do not have assigned parking spots! I love the idea of painting spots, but when I get to school in the morning I don’t want to have to drive around for five extra minutes not being able to find a spot,” junior Reese Langhorne said.

Students of BHS have been interested to know the “why?” behind not being able to paint their parking spots. I have talked to a few underclassmen wanting to know the reasons behind parking spots, but many didn’t have any ideas at all. Many thought that it was because of money. I recently interviewed our very own principal Dr. Daghe, and he had quite the story for me.

Principal Dr. Daghe has been working at Brownsburg for about 25 years and explained why we no longer can paint parking spots. “An easy answer is we haven’t done it for about 15 years. What began to happen was when we had done it before, it was a smaller school of about 1,200 students, and now it has doubled to about 3,000 students. With 1,200 kids, it was more manageable. However, it is just as problematic. People would paint their spot with things that people didn’t like and then have to paint over them. Someone would get there and park in the wrong spot. So everybody was in the wrong spot. We had to get everyone out of class to move the car. I guess what really happened was we ended up killing some of the things in the budget. In order to paint your spot and resurface the parking lot every year, we had to go to at least a three year rotation,” said Daghe.

Although many attempts have been made over the past 15 years to get this event back, there has been no luck and even asking if it would be possible to paint again was a very strongly answered “no.” With that being said, it does not make students happy. Parking is “first come, first serve” as Daghe mentioned. No matter if we paint or do not paint our senior parking spaces, there will always be students that are unhappy with the school’s choices.

“I am upset that they have gotten rid of seniors painting spots. I think it would be fun to paint my own spot and not have to get here super early in the morning to find my parking spot,” sophomore Kadence Bishop said.

While I might not have gotten the chance to change much about senior parking/painting, there were other things mentioned about possibly being able to create new murals within the school. Since the school has been under construction for many years and will continue to go into more construction around my graduation year of 2024, I can look forward to the ability to add some spice to the walls that many others, including myself, call high school.

Dr. Daghe ended the conversation by wanting to add new ideas to BHS. “What is it that you would want to put up around the school?”