Students driving to school in the morning are wide awake after they hit speed bumps and potholes that throw their car around.

To navigate the parking lots, students must constantly swerve around potholes littered through the lots. The rear annex parking lot has numerous holes, as noted by some students.

“There used to be a big pothole pulling in but they actually fixed that one, and there’s a few others,” senior Josh Bell said. “They’ve done a pretty good job fixing everything.”

Many of the holes are created by weather damage in the winter, assistant principal Mike Norris said.

“There are potholes, obviously,” Norris said. “They get repaired, they come back. Part of the reason for that is when we’re pushing snow with the snow plows, it will catch the patch and rip it up. The other problem is in the winter if there’s a crack at all, water gets in there, expands when it freezes and starts breaking off.”

The deterioration of the parking lot leaves it with potholes and massive cracks. Potholes dot the rear lot, cracks cover the front student parking and one hole between the annex and parking lot jolts cars around.

“The whole back parking lot is the worst,” junior Ruby Cruse said. “It’s super crowded. The whole parking lot itself [has] potholes everywhere… It could use work, like being repaved.”

The district’s utilities department is in charge of fixing the damage. Previous plans to redo the front parking lot were made along with the front entrance reconstruction. After looking at budget issues, the plans weren’t able to be finalized, said Tony Barron, director of facilities and operations.

“There was an estimated price to do it,” he said. “We wanted to do both— that side and the other one— but we couldn’t afford it. Our capital improvement plan didn’t have enough funds in it to fund it.”

The capital improvement plan is a list of capital expenditures developed by department administrators, finance director Kathy Johnson said. One of these administrators is Barron.

These expenditures are prioritized in a four-year plan, Johnson said. As things change, the order of priorities might change as well.

The utilities department completes jobs based on importance of the job requests, Barron said. For example, a broken facility door is more important than filling a pothole.

Juggling the jobs of five district buildings puts parking lot jobs towards the bottom of that list, Barron said.

“We prioritize it with our other five locations and get to it wherever it falls in line,” Barron said.

Complaints about potholes and cracks in the parking lot were heard by the district, and plans were made to fill them, but they weren’t completed. The school’s capital improvement plan didn’t have enough money or priority to follow through with the plans, on top of other construction jobs they have.

Barron advises students to reach out to the administration if they find problems with the building, in or out so the facilities can work towards fixing the problem.