Students have countless excuses, from “my dog ate my homework” to “but I was busy!” But the students who claim they are late to school because of traffic, aren’t always lying. Since East is a high school, almost half of the school can’t drive, leaving parents or a carpool to transport students to and from school. Student drivers have a designated parking lot. Parents, however, do not. They stop wherever they want to drop off kids, which is dangerous for both drivers behind them, and student drivers walking up to school from the lot.

Aleah Miller, a senior at East, is not a fan of how parents drop off. “It’s my pet peeve when people drop off their students right before the walk-up in the parking lot. That’s a fire lane, you can’t stop there,” Miller says. Teachers have noticed this as well. Mrs. Miller agrees that parent drop offs are a big problem.

East is bordered by two very busy streets: 70th and A street. Both are being used to get younger kids to school and themselves to work, so turning left on either street causes a major traffic back up. A big cause of this is the number of people coming from one side of town, rather than from all directions, another disadvantage to East’s high enrollment. Denise, a bus driver for East, specifically has a big problem dealing with this.

“It takes me a good twenty minutes to get from A street to my drop off because of the heavy traffic coming in,” Denise says. “That’s something really frustrating because you can pretty much judge the time, but yet on certain days you can’t.” Some students and teachers have found that leaving early helps staying out of long lines to turn into East and A street. Running late is a problem many people face, but it can be avoided by leaving earlier than normal and talking to your parents about when and where they drop off.