ampus. 

As of April 30, the teacher and Walgrove parking lots have been closed off to students. Campus aids monitor the entrances and let in staff with parking passes distributed last week.

With no prior notice for students to prepare for this sudden change—and leaving no secure parking for students here at Venice—a handful of students are now resorting to parking blocks away from the school to attend.

Senior Josie Grippe said that she is clueless on where to park now that her usual spot in the Walgrove parking lot is no longer available.

“I arrived at school at 8:10 one morning, and all the outside parking was full and the lot gate was blocked by a campus aid, but I was given no further instructions on where to go,” she said. “All surrounding parking near the school requires a permit or is for two-hours only, which forces me to park a couple of blocks behind Costco.”

An external email was sent to staff members on April 23 reminding them of the existing parking protocols. 

“Parking is for Venice Staff only,” the email read. “We will have a permit for all Venice Staff. We do not have parking available for visitors or students.”

According to principal Yavonka Hairston-Truitt, the reason for this change is because the safety team needed to focus more on the usage of the staff parking lot to ensure access is available.

“The school does not have an allocated parking area for students as the current design of the school has limited parking to barely cover the over 200 staff members at the school,” she said. “We have not had a student lot available on the Venice campus for over five years, so to my understanding, students mostly park on the streets.”

Although some students have been using the Venice parking lots, Hariston-Truitt said that the school has “never advertised parking for students.”

“But, I think we could improve on communicating to parents that we do not offer student parking,” she said.

Parking is already a limited resource here at Venice, and with an unrecorded number of student drivers, parking isn’t made a priority.

“Before they even think about making a student parking, they need to know how many students it’s impacting,” assistant principal Mistie Barela said.