For the past three years, seniors have spent the last days of summer vacation painting their parking spots. Senior parking spots have become a tradition, and the parking spots reflect the passions and interests of each student.
Seniors Lina Rice, Matthew Edge, and Maddie Giles each painted their spots themselves and look at them as representations of who they are as individuals.
Students create parking spots to showcase their hobbies and interests like Lina’s spot, which depicts a camera with a globe as the lens.
“I chose my design because I got into photography last year and it took over my life,” Lina said. “I also really love to travel, and that’s how I put the two things together.”
Other seniors look at their spots as a way to express their future plans. Matthew’s parking spot is a NASA logo with a backdrop of a dark sky filled with stars.
“I chose my design because I’ve always been interested in space and rockets,” Matthew said. “That’s what I’m going to study in college next year: aerospace engineering.”
Maddie’s parking spot took a more symbolic approach as she painted a detailed mandala dreamcatcher
“I like dreamcatchers in general,” Maddie said. “I’m also a fourth generation Cherokee, and it serves to honor my heritage.”
Though creating the parking spots was fun, there were some obstacles the seniors had to overcome.
“The hardest part was probably securing the stencil,” Matthew said. “It was really windy the day that I needed my stencils, so to keep them from blowing away I taped down every inch of the stencil.”
Other than mother nature, many seniors also came to realize how difficult it is to paint something on the ground.
“The hardest part was probably the amount of detail I chose to put into my spot,” Maddie said. “There was a whole lot of on-your-stomach painting for almost two hours, and you’d have maybe one-one hundredth of the spot done”
Many seniors also recruited help from friends and family to complete their spots.
“I recruited my grandfather to help me get paint and paint it,” Lina said. “We had to print out a large image of a globe so we could paint it somewhat correctly. It was a lot of paint and stencils.”
The parking spots are a source of solace for the seniors, who undergo much stress in their final year of high school and welcome the idea of the get-together.
“There are a whole lot of things we don’t get to do around here,” Lina said. “One of the few traditions we do get to have as seniors are the parking spots, and it’s nice to have because it’s something that’s ours.”
Matthew also weighed in on that, saying that the spots are a welcome break before the school year.
“I think the spots are a cool thing to do,” Matthew said. “When we get cool things to do, it takes the stress off of us as students with all the rules we have.”
Maddie Giles says that painting the parking spots is a great way that the seniors spend time with each other.
“I feel like it’s something that a lot of people can get together to do before school starts,” Maddie said. “You can get everyone and be together as friends.”
