By: Lily Amback / News and Opinion editor
Every winter, when snow falls, there is the dreaded freezing walk into the school building. Luckily, with the senior parking spots that started this year, many seniors will cut down on that walk. However, some are not so lucky.
Many of the new senior parking spots have been filled with snow the past few weeks. The seniors were left to fend for themselves to either shovel or find a new temporary spot.
One senior, Derek Bilyou, and some friends, seniors William Lindsay, Kamryn Clark, and Joseph Bauer, shoveled Bilyou’s parking spot.
“We (Bilyou and Lindsay) were using a plastic shovel for about three hours of it, and then our buddies (Clark and Bauer) got out of track practice, ran home, and they brought back an actual metal shovel, which sped it along a whole lot,” Bilyou said.
Even with four people, the shoveling of Bilyou’s parking spot took around five hours. On Thursday after the big snowfall, Bilyou dropped off his siblings at home, grabbed his shoveling equipment and came back to the school to shovel from three to eight in the afternoon.
Lindsay stayed and helped for the first three hours. Then Clark and Bauer took over helping Bilyou.
However, even with the help, they only go through shoveling Bilyou’s spot.
“We only did my spot. (I’m) working on William (Lindsay), on his spot,” Bilyou said. “I’ve been doing a little bit every day. It’s taken a hot minute.”
While shoveling, Bilyou was forced to park his car far away as there were no close spots free of snow.
“While shoveling, I parked it just in a senior parking spot beside mine. But whenever I didn’t have my spot, I parked all the way at the back of a student lot, which sucked,” Bilyou said.
During the five hour shoveling process, Bilyou took a break.
“I took one break, and that was to go get a snack from the gas station, and then we came back and got back to work,” Bilyou said.
Bilyou normally shovels the driveway at his house, but the parking lot posed a new struggle for him: it was solid ice, not snow.
“It was completely different because my driveway doesn’t have six feet of snow stacked on top of it, and it also is a giant block of ice. It was, mostly, the majority of it, ice,” Bilyou said.
During the summer, Bilyou also spent countless hours designing and painting his senior parking spot which is configured to represent one of his favorite singers, Pitbull.
“I just really like the artist Pitbull, and that’s just who I painted on there. I put a few of my favorite albums on there, like Globalization,” Bilyou said. “Dale, it just kind of means ‘let’s go.’ It’s something Pitbull says a lot. It’s kind of more like a phrase, it doesn’t have a one-to-one meaning in English.”
