Starting this year, the administration has established new rules in an attempt to maintain organization and increase safety. These rules include preventing students from going to the parking lot during tutorial, assigning lockers to all students and prohibiting student drop-off and pick up by parents in the back parking lot.

    The back parking lot is now off limits as part of the administration’s attempt to make drop-off and pick-up process, safer and more efficient — and also to give teachers and other staff members a clear and safe parking area. For years, teachers complained about the numerous difficulties they were faced with, navigating an area clogged with cars as they tried to park and make their way to class; some even had to avoid being hit by cars as they walked between the cars in the morning traffic jam in the back lot.

In addition, with many cars lined up to pick up students after school, teachers found it difficult to get to their cars when trying to leave campus. Another problem was that students made a habit of running jaywalking and running in front of moving cars in order to get to their class on time, risking both their safety and the safety of others, while also leading to liability issues for the school.

Teachers are finding this change very helpful. “I’d get stuck in the line of parents trying to drop off their kids in the morning. It’s been an annoyance and a safety concern,” said media arts teacher Alex Hemmerich.

According to assistant principal Brian Safine, the rule prohibiting students from going to the parking lot during tutorial was implemented because of the necessity to fulfill the required instructional minutes laid out by the State of California’s Department of Education

The school counts tutorial toward its annual instructional minutes, and it wants kids to be using it in an academic fashion rather than hanging out in the parking lot, Safine said. Not to mention, auditors from California’s DOE would frown upon students’ misuse of tutorial.

“We wanted to make sure students were in a place where they were more likely to access their teachers, which is in the central part of campus,” Safine said. “If we have students who hang out in the parking lot for the majority of the tutorial time, it’s really hard to justify those as instructional minutes.”

Some upperclassmen, such as senior Robert Scott, feel that these some of these new restrictions are excessive and don’t allow the level of freedom that should be associated with being 17 or 18 years old.

“There’s a little bit more responsibility that high schoolers should be able to have, and that includes going into the parking lot during tutorial,” Scott said.

The decision to keep students from going to their cars during tutorial has also led the administration to assign lockers to all students, with the hopes that upperclassmen will now use their lockers instead of their cars to store their school supplies.

Perhaps the decision that has caused the most controversy is the one to prohibit dropoff in the back parking lot, the spot where most teachers and staff members park.

Scott thinks this change has had unintended negative consequences, including the “chaos” in the front parking lot now. Not only is the traffic much longer in the front parking lot, but because of the limited space for drop-off, some parents now drop their kids off in the senior lot, which has made finding parking more difficult for seniors, Scott said.

Although the administration has not enforced strict rules to this extent in the recent past, other students seem to understand the administration’s intentions in implementing the new rules.  

“It seems like it’s a lot more smooth and there is a lot less traffic on Herriman. It’s just more efficient for everyone,” senior ASB president Nathon Chin said.