As you walk into the middle school parking lot this year, it may seem ordinary. However, if you ask any AHS student who drives to school each morning, the parking system has had a notable addition. This year, the Aspen School District is facing parking pass complications by adding volunteers to make sure students and faculty are parking in the correct spots.

In previous years, seniors, juniors, and some sophomores used the parking lot without thinking it was any problem at all. Besides a few comments from seniors about the underclassmen using the parking lot, it seemed like a convenient spot to park for juniors and sophomores who didn’t buy passes. However in recent years the parking lot has become overflowed with students and faculty alike. The school parking lot has roughly 150 spaces in it. That may sound like enough for the 83 seniors who purchased parking passes, but take in to account for the 80 faculty members then add the sophomores and juniors without parking passes, and things get a bit cluttered.

Assistant Principal Bangley and Principal Mulberry explained that this is the first year, in recent memory, that the parking rules are heavily enforced at AHS. In order to successfully implement the new system, volunteer bus drivers and lunch monitors have been asked to survey the parking lot, looking for students who aren’t obeying the new parking rules.

“We have one checking out there everyday,” Bangley said.

Principal Mulberry explained that the biggest reason for the enforcement of the parking rules is student and faculty safety. According to Mulberry, if the school parking lot is used as public parking during school hours, a random threat could be parked in the lot.

“Without the parking monitors we wouldn’t know who was out there,” said Mulberry.

The penalty given by the volunteers is a notice, a small slip explaining what the person did wrong and what to do to correct the problem. If problems proceed to happen, eventually a fine will be issued to the person who was not following the rules of the lot. The biggest problem for the parking lot is the number of parking spots.

Angela Rittenhouse, administrative assistant, hears many complaints and challenges faced in the parking lot.

“We don’t have enough space for the amount of people that want to park there,” said Rittenhouse.

The 160 plus people in the lot is such a difficulty, people have been reported to park in the fire lane of the faculty lot at the high school.

“High school students want to park up here and we can’t do that we don’t have enough spots up here [faculty lot],” Rittenhouse said.

Students are not the only ones facing limitations for parking, however. Teachers have also only been able to acquire a single sticker this year, while in previous years, employees with multiple vehicles were able to obtain multiple passes.

Although adding the parking monitors may seem like a small adjunct to help enforce the rules in the middle school lot, seniors like Nik Morgan have a different opinion on the subject.

“It’s a bit ridiculous that students have to park in the very back of the lot,” Morgan said. “Especially when us seniors had to pay a lot of money for the passes. A lot of underclassmen that don’t even have passes take up a lot of the lot.”