Parking at Sentinel has been scarce recently. There are people parking on crosswalks or making their own parking spots because the parking is extremely limited. People that come into school later in the day are being affected by the lack of parking, some have to park in the streets. Even though a lot of students choose to park in the streets to avoid the parking lot after school, it is becoming evident that more and more people are taking up the street parking surrounding Sentinel. What is making the parking scanty?

Being a Montanan, snow is in everyone’s 99 problems in the winter. It makes driving impossible at times and causes a lot of extra maintenance. At Sentinel, WMS, owned by Kirk Mace, plows the snow. After sitting down with Kevin Talkington, the main operator of WMS, it was very clear who is responsible for the lack of parking in the Sentinel parking lots.

Talkington explained that the job that Sentinel instructed him to do was pile the snow in the places that he was instructed to put them. He then went on to explain that they offered to haul the snow away, but Sentinel said that it wasn’t worth the money to bring it to a dumping yard. It is time to bring staff to question and have them explain why it is worth the money to get rid of the snow. 

The snow is causing a lot of interesting and hazardous parking methods. After reaching out to Sentinel students, it is very apparent that the need to get rid of the snow is important to solving this issue. One student expressed their concerns, ”Parking is getting so scarce that I had to park my car in a very tight parking space which put me in constant anxiety throughout class of getting my car dinged.” Parking isn’t everyone’s expertise, which is fine, but when the parking spots are so limited that parking on the line or close to the line, isn’t acceptable. No one should be forced to park on the streets or park on the crosswalks within the parking lot because of the snow piles in multiple locations. The employees are only doing what they are instructed to do, so it is time to set the record straight and know that Sentinel is the only group at fault for the lack of parking in both lots.

Sentinel students are enraged at the various piles of snow taking up multiple parking spots just because it isn’t deemed necessary to pay extra money to get rid of the snow. It is also very interesting that there isn’t a pile of snow in the teacher section of the parking lot of the student lot. Why wasn’t the snow put there? There are a lot of questions that have yet to be answered. It is likely that there will be another snowfall and more parking spots will be lost because high authorities of Sentinel don’t see a need for comfortable and safe parking. It is highly recommended that students parking in the lots get to school early, for it not they will be forced to park unsafely or on the neighboring streets.