St. Andrew’s parking proposal would help

As a parent of a student at Newport Harbor High School and as a

member of St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church’s Building Committee, I

would like to offer my perspective regarding local parking.

It is no secret that there is a parking problem at Newport Harbor

High School. More than 750 students have the ability to drive a car

to school each day. Many of these students have provisional driver’s

licenses, which prohibit them from allowing other kids under the age

of 18 to carpool with them to school. There are approximately 430

parking spaces on campus, there are approximately 250 spaces in the

15th Street parking lot and 180 at the 16th Street parking lot; of

these, 140 spaces are reserved for faculty, staff, handicapped

drivers or visitors. There are 35 spaces for students to park at St.

Andrew’s when the lot is available. The rest of the students are

forced to park their cars in the surrounding neighborhood streets.

Many neighborhood streets have a two-hour parking limit, except

for residents with permit stickers. As a result, students leave

campus every two hours and move their cars to alternate locations. An

unsafe situation occurs on the local streets when students leave

campus all at the same time, during breaks and cross streets to move

their cars throughout the neighborhood in search of replacement

parking.

Many people view this as a safety concern. When students are

off-campus there is little control from a security standpoint. The

high school can’t monitor what students are doing in their cars or in

the neighborhood. Students often use their cars as lockers and campus

security has a difficult time monitoring what is brought onto campus.

St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church wants to help alleviate the

parking problems facing the school and the community and create some

additional parking for the church during nonschool hours. They

recently submitted a proposal to the Newport-Mesa Unified School

District for a written, long-term agreement to use the Newport Harbor

High School parking lot at 15th Street. In return for this agreement,

St. Andrew’s will fund the removal and relocation of two older

storage buildings from the parking lot and reconfigure the lot so

that it can accommodate approximately 80 additional, full-size

parking spaces. This will bring the available parking in this lot

from approximately 250 spaces up to 330 spaces.

An agreement with the school district is separate and apart from

St. Andrew’s proposal for a Youth and Family Center on the existing

St. Andrew’s campus. We believe providing increased parking at

Newport Harbor High School’s 15th Street parking lot will provide

significant benefits for the entire community whether or not St.

Andrew’s moves forward with the proposed Youth and Family Center.

Community meetings to address this issue will be held at Newport

Harbor High School in Portable 9 near the pool on Thursday and March

1 at 7 p.m. Another meeting will be held in Dierenfield Hall at St.

Andrew’s Presbyterian Church on March 1 at 10 a.m.

JON MARCHIORLATTI

Newport Beach