Cars are parked at the corner of Northeast Fifth Street and Northeast 94th Avenue near Henrietta Lacks Health and Bioscience High School on Monday morning. Residents in the neighborhood say traffic in the neighborhood has become progressively worse since the school opened in 2013. (Nathan Howard/The Columbian)Photo Gallery
You can provide busing for a high-school student, but you can’t make them ride.
OK, that’s not how the phrase goes, but it is what residents surrounding Henrietta Lacks Health and Bioscience High School have discovered since the school opened in 2013. Neighbors say some students at the 595-student school are driving to the campus, at 9105 N.E. Ninth St., Vancouver, and parking their cars in the surrounding neighborhood.
Hela High School doesn’t have a student parking lot. Students are supposed to go to their home campus, then catch a bus to the magnet high school. But that’s not the reality on the ground, said Lisa Hoffman, who lives nearby. Hoffman, who has lived in the neighborhood for 23 years, said there are usually five or six cars parked in front of her house, preventing street sweepers from reaching her curbs and trash collectors from accessing her garbage cans.
“The school district, they just give you lip service and nothing happens,” Hoffman said. “I almost feel like going to the kids and saying ‘You don’t have to apparently follow any rules, so don’t worry about breaking any rules because your school district isn’t going to hold you accountable at all.’ ”
District officials acknowledge the problem, and they note that students and parents both sign a contract when they enroll pledging they won’t drive to school.
“It’s not as if students or parents are surprised that this is going on,” district spokeswoman Gail Spolar said.
But they also dispute the assessment that the parking problems are as widespread as some in the neighborhood say. Sue Steinbrenner, executive director of facilities for the district, said staff last year ran the plate numbers for 61 cars that neighbors reported were parking in the neighborhood. Of those, 21 — or 34 percent — belonged to students.
“I think there’s a perception that there’s all this stuff happening,” Steinbrenner said.
Jeff Adams, another nearby resident, has put in about 150 complaints with the district about the parking and traffic situation in the neighborhood alone. He’s skeptical that the district is holding up its end of the bargain to respond to those complaints, and he said he feels his concerns and those of his neighbors have been ignored.
“We have a loose, ragtag group of people who are trying to get the issue solved, but we’ve gotten nothing out of the school district,” Adams said.
Steinbrenner also disagreed with that characterization. She noted the district is also going to neighborhood association meetings, reaching out to individual neighbors and encouraging neighbors to submit complaints if they feel a student is parking or driving through their street.
In the meantime, the district is working with the city of Vancouver to “offer very limited” student parking somewhere on site to ease the pressure on surrounding neighborhoods, Spolar said. The district wants students to pursue internships, college classes and other off-campus opportunities without having to worry about transportation.
“How can we make it practical for students to have that experience and overcome some of those transportation options while at the same time not building a huge parking lot?” Spolar said.
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