Senior Whitney Brooks wakes up every morning at 6:30 sharp, like clockwork. She gets ready, eats breakfast, then leaves her house at around 7:40. At 8:17, she pulls her red Nissan Leaf into the University Prep parking lot. To her dismay, she rolls in to see that the other students have filled all the parking spots, displacing her to the neighborhood.
According to Brooks, the lot often fills by 8:20. After that, drivers are forced to scrounge for an open section of curb in the surrounding area. Parking is especially difficult the later she arrives at school.
“When I get to school late, it’s hard to park,” Brooks said. “There’s not a lot of spots left, and I find it hard to park in the second lot because the spaces are so small.”
Senior Ian Gaffney arrives to school at 8:20 and has many of the same difficulties with finding parking every morning.
“I can’t even find a single spot to park in,” Gaffney said. “And so I have to make the drive of shame around out of the U and behind the school, and then I have to park at the hill.”
In the 2022-2023 school year there are 98 registered student drivers, yet only 68 spots are offered in the parking lot shared with Temple Beth Am. For Director of Facilities and Safety Officer Martin Pawlina, this unbalanced ratio is an unfortunate fact of life, and doesn’t show signs of stopping.
“I know the parking is tight, and it’s going to be even tighter as we grow,” Pawlina said. “It’s just tough, and that’s just a reality of going to school in Seattle. We can’t just cut down some trees in the back and make a twice-as-big parking lot.”
Brooks agrees with the sentiment, acknowledging that there is little the school can do to expand parking.
“It’s kind of hard because the school is located in a neighborhood,” Brooks said. “It’s not like you can tear down a bunch of houses and add parking, and then there’s a public park and like the P-Patch, so there wouldn’t really be any place to add parking.”
For future UPrep upper school students the situation may be even more difficult. According to the Assistant Head of School for Finance and Operations Susan Lansverk the incoming classes for the next couple years will have an increasing number of students, but no additional parking.
“So it will take a couple of years for each of those new ninth grade classes to come in. Once we’ve done that, our high school classes will be 112 to 119 [students], in that range,” Lansverk said.
Even with the school’s growing student body there will only be a total of 15 new parking spots with the opening of the ULab in the fall of 2023. From Pawlina’s point of view, parking is only going to get tighter.
“We are increasing every year by X amount of students. It’s not a huge number. But you know, one over is already one that doesn’t fit right,” Pawlina said.
Especially with the school’s expansion in the coming years, UPrep members should expect adjustments to their transportation tactics.
“We need more of our faculty and staff and students to use public transportation and to get here by carpooling,” Lansverk said. “Most schools have limits on their students for parking. So there will be things that, as we grow, we will implement.”