Sage Gilliland

Parked cars sit in the Prospect parking lot.

As someone who bikes to school, when the bell rings, I don’t get to bolt out the door like a dog whose owners weren’t careful enough while bringing in groceries like some of my peers. Instead, I have to wait in the commons for upwards of twenty minutes, and anyone familiar with Prospect understands why. The after-school parking lot can be described as nothing less than overcome with cars making a slow and tedious march to freedom.

Some especially impatient students, when faced with this wait time, take matters into their own hands — and early this March, with a sudden phenomenon of staff members patrolling the parking lots and revoking the parking passes of reckless drivers, they’ve been facing consequences for it. In a Mar. 10 interview with KnightMedia, Associate Principal Frank Mirandola explained where this crackdown is coming from and what it means.

According to Mirandola, all would-be parking pass holders must attend a 10-day seminar with Prospect’s deans and School Resource Officer Tyler Johnson about “the do’s and don’ts in the parking lot” before they can receive parking passes. However, leading up to one routine staff meeting, a division emailed the principal team a question ahead of time that brought up the issue of unsafe driving.

“And so I saw that, and I [was] like, well, what is unsafe?” Mirandola said. “And, you know, what does that look like?”

Hours later, Mirandola would find out. At home that evening, he got a message that a staff member’s car had been hit — and looking through security camera footage of Prospect’s parking lots, he observed “just dangerous driving practices.” The next day, Mirandola took a team outside as the last bell rang to identify those who were part of the problem.

“And sure enough, on the first day, there [were] roughly 14, 15 cars that were observed by multiple people that were not exhibiting the safe driving principles that were clearly laid out in class,” Mirandola said. “And so those parking passes were temporarily revoked based upon the decisions [the drivers] made to drive illegally or to drive when using unsafe practices.”

Mirandola says increased efforts to curtail reckless student driving do not have an established end date, but instead are now an ongoing policy.

“It’s one of those things where it can’t be a one-and-done [event] … It’s not about ‘I gotcha,’” Mirandola said. “This is about creating a safe parking lot. We have a responsibility to keep students safe. We have responsibilities to our parents, our guardians to make sure their children come home safe. And so we need to act upon behavior that is not exactly allowing us to do that.”

Staff members, Mirandola says, will continue to appear randomly as cars leave the parking lot at the end of the school day, stationed wherever they feel supervision is necessary. He cites specific behaviors counting as cause to temporarily revoke parking passes as not stopping at stop signs and driving through areas that aren’t thoroughfares, such as between parked cars and through a makeshift lane on the west side of Prospect to avoid the Kensington stoplight.

First-time offenders will be contacted by the dean and have their parking passes revoked for a period of time proportional to the severity of the offense. Multiple infractions, however, can carry stiffer penalties. Mirandola says he doesn’t know the exact number, but around 20 students have faced consequences for reckless driving so far.

“This is not a campaign. This is not just a targeted effort. This is going to be something that we have to continue to monitor, continue to enforce and spot check throughout the course of the year. [Student safety is] our number one priority,” Mirandola said. “And we’re going to continue to spot check for student safety to ensure that everybody is doing what they’re supposed to be doing, where they’re supposed to be doing it and how they’re supposed to be doing it.”

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