The Price of Parking: What are We Really Paying For?
Student parking pass. Photo credit: image created by Chat GTP
By: Olivia Cannon
Every year the Jenks High School students who can drive have to make a decision to either pay for a $30 parking pass or take the hot and smelly bus to school every day. But why should we have to pay to park? Every year I hear lots of complaints from students about having to fill out long forms and pay the school and a lot of the students questioning what even is the point, what are they doing with our money, and how much do they even get from making us pay? After researching this, I have found that it makes no sense for us to have to pay.
For students to park legally at Jenks High School, they have to buy a parking pass that at the beginning of the year costs $30 or $15 if bought during the second semester. If you choose to risk parking without a pass and are caught you will be given a $20 ticket the first time you are caught, a $25 ticket the second time, and a $30 ticket the third time. The fourth time you are caught your car will get booted, this could cause your car to get towed, plus the $50 removal fee of the boot, I’ve been told, could bring the total cost to around $200. But what is the school doing with this money?
Talking to the high school campus police I found out that the money that students pay for parking passes and parking tickets goes into an account called General Funds. The General Funds account is used to pay for literally anything. The money could go to something like fixing a broken door, buying snacks for the teachers, and even occasionally paying to keep the Jenks Trojan Torch newspaper going. So really the money that we're paying may not necessarily go to paying for things that benefit us. If the money isn’t all being used for student benefits, does our contribution make a significant impact on the school’s finances? If not, why do they need it?
In summary, no, the money we give the school for parking passes is very insignificant. There are 2,678 students in 10th-12th grade and obviously not all of them drive to school especially because some of the sophomores are even old enough to drive, but falsely assuming that every single one of those 2,678 students bought a parking pass and drove to school, the school would only have made $80,340, which I found by multiplying the number of students by thirty for the cost of the parking passes. Saying only $80,340 sounds insane because that sounds like a lot of money to me but in comparison to the amount of money that the school is issued into the General Funds account each month that is nothing.
September 2023 finance report. Picture credit: Jenks Public Schools Website
Jenks publishes a monthly financial report that you can see on the Jenks Public Schools website under the Business Office section. The picture above is the finance report from September 2023 the highlighted part is showing that there was $10,465,822.85 issued to the school general fund account just for September. Jenks is issued around this same amount of money every month into just their general funds including during summer break. In total for the whole of 2023-2024 school year July-June they received about $117,547,773 into their general funds account alone not even counting the money they get for other things like food and building. The money we pay for parking passes they only get once at the beginning of the year so spread out across all twelve months it would only be like the school getting $6,695 a month. With the millions of dollars the school gets the measly $6,695 they get from us a month is nothing but there has to be a point for taking our money right?
The reason I was given by campus police is safety. The parking passes help to quickly identify if the car is supposed to be at the school or belongs to some who should not be on campus, but with them costing money I know a ton of people who refuse to get a pass and park every day without one. But what could they do to help this because right now with so many people refusing passes all they can do is ticket the cars and hope they belong to a disobeying student and not an intruder on campus.
What I suggest doing is using some of their millions of dollars to provide free parking passes for students-just like the teachers receive. This would make more students inclined to getting a pass which would help the campus police figure out if a car is actually supposed to be there or not.
Free parking is something that a ton of students have expressed wanting and would hardly take any money for the school to do this while keeping the students safer. Free parking passes would allow campus police to catch a car that's not supposed to be there quicker and would also keep students from parking further away off campus and walking which could put them in danger while they try to get to campus, overall, allowing campus police to do their job of keeping us safe more efficiently.
Ps. If the finance part of this story made you curious about what the school does with its money you should check out our story Money, Money, Money: Where Does it Go? written by Crystal Best.
