To parking pass or not to parking pass?

Are you a student at Harding who drives to school? Did you know that in order to park in the student parking lot you must pay $5 to have a parking pass?

Parking passes have been a thing at Harding for years; Ms. Bebout says for as long as she can remember, and Guidance Secretary Ms. Eckard quotes, “We even had them back when I graduated in 2001.” Harding students, for at least 21 years, have had to pay to park in the student parking lot when driving to school. But this brings up some questions; what is the parking pass anyway? Why does it exist? And what happens to your precious $5?

To get a pass, you can find Ms. Eckard at Guidance, fill out a form to turn in along with your $5, and she’ll give you a parking pass to hang behind your windshield.

Officer Dunaway, Harding’s School Resource Officer, does in fact make rounds checking cars in the parking lot every so often throughout the school year, but he’s not checking for parking passes. “I’m just checking to make sure no headlights are left on, there’s not stuff in the car…that shouldn’t be on school property,” Dunaway says. He also notes that when checking cars, he doesn’t really know what car belongs to a student or a staff member, because there’s staff who park in the student parking lot, students who park in the staff parking lot, and even some people who park in the loop out front. “I don’t know which is a kid’s car or which is a [teacher's car].”

But what’s the point of parking passes if no one stops you for not having one? It turns out that the main reason they exist is just to generate money for the principal’s fund, a fund that can buy things for the staff and students: for example, T-shirts or staff retirement gifts. So, ultimately, parking passes are just another way for the school to get some extra dough and really nothing else.

In an interview with Guidance Secretary Ms. Eckard, she remarks, “I think that in order to support our school, it’s a good thing,” and upon questioning a handful of student drivers, I found that most of them didn’t really mind the yearly $5 fee.