Parking problems persist for east side high school students

As the final steel beam is raised on the new Eastwood High School building Wednesday morning, ABC-7 learned that the parking problems keep rolling into surrounding communities.

“It’s just packed. It’s just a mess,” said one student. “It seems like they really were not like prepared for what was going to happen.”

But Eastwood administrators and Ysleta Independent School District are trying to help ease student parking problems.

As ABC-7 reported in November 2017, the school created parking agreements with nearby churches, paying more than $130,000 for 300 spots. But some students said this week that the locations are simply too far.

“We always get tardies,” a student told ABC-7. Others said they continue to drive into the surrounding Eastridge neighborhood to park a little closer to campus.

Neighbors told ABC-7 they actually have a bigger problem than their streets being lined with cars that don’t belong to the homeowners.

“Our main concern is all the trash we pick up daily here,” said one woman.

Another neighbor said, “Sometime ago, I had to get after some of (the students) because of the trash they were throwing in the street.”

Some neighbors took their trash problems to their city representative, Henry Rivera, who held a community meeting about it in February. In his newsletter last week, he said that he contacted the school administrators about the concerns. Rivera published the school’s daily and weekly call-outs delivered to parents. In them, Eastwood officials ask that students pick up placards that allow them use of the churches’ parking lots.

The $93 million renovation of the school is the largest construction project of the 2015 bond.

The reconstructed campus is slated to open in fall 2019.