The two administrators who spoke at Monday night’s Board of Education meeting, about the necessity of the North High student parking lot neglected to mention how they intend to prevent students from parking elsewhere if they did not wish to park in the lot.
They referenced that they will install a gate preventing the students from leaving the lot.
If this is the case, then why has a gate not been installed on the current two existing lots on the north and southwest corners of Beach and Polo Roads?
The GNPS doesn’t employ a guard to watch the parking lot all day.
As a result, students can now leave the lot in their cars midday. If this is a safety issue for the administrators now, then why isn’t a gate installed? Installation of a gate would be cheaper than 1. building a new lot, 2. employing a guard to watch the lot all day, 3. address the safety issue of students leaving midday, which they currently do.
This would also test the gate hypothesis before spending $652,000 for a possibly inadequate solution.
Will locking the cars in the lot really reduce safety issues? Will students still park in the lot in this situation? What happens if a series of students need to leave early, at different times, to satisfy job or coop commitments?
One administrator claimed that all the ‘stakeholders’ at the building level were included in the decision making for this lot. These stakeholders were the parents who want their children to drive.
But if you live in the area, you were not considered a stakeholder.
Residents living in the vicinity were not invited to Shared Decision Making Committee meetings – these were strictly for residents with students attending the school.
It was incumbent upon the Board of Education and administration to include residents without kids in the high school as those ‘stakeholders.’ Yet they did not.
With over 100 items in the recent bond, this is the one item that sticks out as not falling into the category of educational enhancements and infrastructure repair.
The pro parking lot proponents say that we should have known – that there were many bond meetings. What they do not see is that they were invited to the original meetings – so they knew about the lot.
The expectation of non-North HS parents to have read the 100+ line items is unrealistic given the labeling of the bond.
These residents trusted the labeling. If residents had been more educated about this item in the bond, would the BOE have preferred that the entire bond failed because of the parking lot?
Should all of the schools in the school district have suffered because of the choices of the building committee at one school, GNNHS?
And even when a parking lot was listed, it was not the main topic of discussion in any of these bond meetings. It was a buried item to most; except perhaps to those who wished for it and expressed so to their building committees.
One resident spoke about how any science teacher today would extol the virtues of preserving the green space that exists in our local environments.
How ironic that one of the administrators who spoke in favor of paving over the green space, used to be the science department chair.
If the current lots were properly managed, there would be enough spots available. One parent spoke about how she chose GNNHS from the optional zone so that her children would have the freedom to drive to school.
Her children can still drive to school – the Parkwood lot is a viable option that continues to be overlooked. And if her children arrive early, they can get the closer spots.
Just like when you go to the train station early, you can park in the lot right next to the train; if you get to school early, you can get to the closer lots.
The Board of Education has not presented to the public a traffic study or a complete environmental impact report.
As residents continue to come forward to voice their objections to the parking lot because of the concerns of increased traffic flow, destruction of green space, and fears of water runoff, our Board of Education has an opportunity to rethink the viability and necessity of it.
With 80 existing spots, why not just add a gate to the existing lots and enforce parking restrictions?
Moving forward, the Board and administration should consider the importance of properly notifying its neighbors.
After listening to all of the passionate personal statements the neighbors made, this could have been done by simply mailing letters to the residents of the blocks surrounding the school.
This experience should be a wakeup call to the neighbors of all of the district’s schools. This board has no respect for your rights or property owners. It is a poor neighbor who sets a poor example for our children.
Robert Mendelson
Great Neck
