Beads of sweat drip down the young man’s face as he grips the steering wheel with all his might. He wants to lay on his horn in frustration and scream because of all the time he’s wasted in this traffic jam day-after-day.

This frustration is caused by the unaware, or maybe just uncaring, parents who drop off and pick up their freshmen and sophomores in the student parking lot.

The established area for dropping off students who don’t drive is on the south side of the building. For this reason, the buses were moved to that area at the end of last year to free up room for the scores of new parents who would be driving their children.

However, now that the time has come, some parents have decided to drop off and pick up their children in the student parking area, adding the traffic of both the buses and parents and creating a chaotic mess that makes a ten minute drive home into a thirty minute lesson in patience. While trudging back to our cars, seeing underclassmen hop into their parents’ cars in senior parking and  line up in front of us in the seemingly endless line can make already skeptical upperclassmen downright hostile. After a long day of battling through freshmen and sophomores to move through the hallways, this overcrowding in the parking lot is the last thing we have tolerance for.

According to Assistant Principal Mike Hill there is no official policy toward parents dropping off their children.

“[But] after fifteen years here it’s pretty much established as the norm to drop students off on the south side,” Hill said.

The reason for the move of the buses is indeed the increase in number of students who don’t drive this year. However, as of right now the administration has no plan of action in mind.

“[Administrators] don’t want to tell parents they can’t [drop students off] on the north side because in reality very few do,” Hill said.

Perhaps if some parents continue to use the student parking area as an area to drop off students and the chaos continues, the administration could consider moving the buses back to the south side of the school. Free State has relatively few real privileges for upperclassmen, and parking is one of them. Surely something could be done to help alleviate this final frustration of the day for upperclassmen who have already battled the lunch line and hallway frustrations.