By Kerri Linsenbigler
Associate Editor
Excluding the townhouse parking lots, there are 214 available daytime parking spaces on St. Bonaventure’s campus. Of these, 163 are available for students. Out of all these open student parking spaces, none are near Hopkins Hall or the Regina A. Quick Center for the Arts, both places of student employment.
In fact, the closest student lot to these buildings is at Doyle, which has just 17 rarely-empty parking spaces, and the Reilly Center lot, which is often closed for basketball games.
As a student worker in the admissions office, I usually have to park all the way in Plassmann for my job in Hopkins.
Especially in negative wind chills, it is no treat to walk all the way across campus at 9:30 a.m. simply because I have no option to park near my place of employment.
And I am not alone in this struggle. More than 30 students work weekly in the admissions department alone, not to mention student workers in technology services, financial aid and other departments. Surely, as employees of the university, we have a right to park near our employer as other faculty and staff.
“We have addressed the question of student worker parking several times in the past at parking committee meetings,” Vito Czyz, director of Safety and Security said. “To grant student worker parking to a select few due to location was deemed to be unfair to the remainder of student workers on campus.”
On the contrary, granting student workers parking based on location would make a lot of sense. Most student parking spaces are located around the west side of campus. Employees of the Richter Center can park in the Reilly Center lot or behind the Richter Center. While there is no direct library parking lot, student workers can park in the Plassmann or the Richter Center lots. The same goes for student workers in the Hickey Dining Hall or Café La Verna. The student workers who are left hanging in the cold are the ones who work toward the opposite side of campus in Hopkins, Doyle and the Quick Center.
This is a problem easily remedied by re-designating some faculty spots to student-worker parking spaces. Safety and Security already allows student workers to temporarily park in Hopkins after business hours for certain jobs, such as telephone recruiting.
I urge Safety and Security to take the next step and reserve a few parking spaces as “student worker only” for those who work during business hours.
It needn’t be some extravagant number of spaces, either. While plenty of students work in Hopkins and the surrounding buildings, only a handful work at the same time. Student work shifts tend to be short, so students would be unlikely to park in the Hopkins lot all day, freeing up the spaces for other student workers.
By reserving student-worker-only spaces in the Hopkins lot, it would reduce the number of student workers who are late to their shifts due to searching for parking on the other side of campus.
Especially this week, walking across campus in the bitter cold could be a safety issue. Student worker parking would also reduce this risk and ensure students arrive to their shifts healthy and ready to work.
Kerri Linsenbigler is an associate editor for The Bona Venture. Her email is linsenka10@bonaventure.edu.
