As the daily lives of high school students continue to change, schools are trying to maintain some semblance of normal. Although school may be canceled for the rest of the semester, that doesn’t stop staff and administration from preparing for the coming year. 

Around this time, students would be turning in their parking applications to the bookstore and receiving their parking passes for next year, and they still can. Starting April 14, students were able to submit the application through a Google form, and email the rest of their important documents to Rosa Leptich, secretary of conduct. Leptich and Bradley Garraway, lead monitor, will be accepting applications through May 8. In order to keep the annual routine of accepting applications, going digital was the best choice they had according to Garraway.

“I don’t really know what other option we had. If we have to fulfill the guidelines and change our policy’s procedure, we had to figure out a way to do it remotely,” Garraway said. “We’ve all been ordered [to stay] at home, so how can we accomplish turning in the application, turning in all pertinent documentation, paying for your parking spot, and issuing decals…we had to think outside the box and come up with some alternative solutions.”

The brainstorming process took place well before the decision to cancel the school year was made. As a precaution, the school administration found it important to come up with a backup plan, just in case they couldn’t use the same procedure from previous years.

“We started discussing it back in, I would say March, the end of March, if indeed schools were going to be closed for the remainder of the school year; we had to come up with some sort of alternative solution to the process that has been in place for many years,” Garraway said. 

When and how students will be receiving and paying for their parking passes is unclear as of yet. It will all be based on what safety guidelines the district and the rest of the state is required to follow in the future.

“It really depends on the rules put in place by Governor Ducey and subsequently Deer Valley Unified School District whether we have you guys come in and pick them up from my office, or whether we have a curbside pickup of parking decals,” Garraway said. “We might stagger the number of students allowed on campus at a time…that is still in discussion and we’re left scratching our heads exactly on how to accomplish that. We want to make sure we have our students’ best interest in mind and keeping with the social distancing.”

Whether or not the school keeps this process and replaces the old one, is dependent upon its success this year. Regardless, a lot of time and effort went into creating this solution, and making it possible for students to apply for parking.

“This is the ever-changing world that we live in. You come from a generation that is accustomed to doing things digitally, so we have vacillated between keeping this process in place for the future or going back to the way we used to do things…as of right now we’ve put forth so much work into instituting this new process that we most likely will keep it as is,” Garraway said. 

During this time, everyone has had to deal with some level of adjustment. Change is hard but sometimes it’s for the best. With this new process for parking applications there is some adapting that needs to be done for both staff and students.

“Because this process is in its infancy stages we’ve had some wrinkles to iron out. Albeit there is a learning curve here. I’ve been doing the same process for the last six years; there is a level of uneasiness with changing the process,” Garraway said. “But I think that we need to be willing to evolve and adapt in this pandemic and in this ever-changing world that we live in.”

*The parking application can be found at www.dvusd.org/sdohs