Parking Pays Off at Area’s High Schools : Auctioning of Best Spaces Helps Meet Big Bills for Senior Proms

For a mere $170, Padgett Curtis has bought the kind of exposure many high school seniors can only dream about. For sheer prestige, it’s hard to beat parking space Number 6 at Granite Hills High School.

Curtis has made the most of it. Splashed against a purple background on her personal stretch of blacktop, a brightly painted Pink Panther reclines on Curtis’ block-letter nickname, “Jett”--visible to all the world except when her aging Dodge Colt obscures her stepfather’s artwork.

“It was in front. I was excited to have it for my senior year,” Curtis said of her decision to bid for a spot in the lot’s coveted front row. “It’s right in front, and everyone will see it.”

By auctioning senior parking spots, at least five high schools in the Grossmont Union High School District have found a way to profit from the demand by students like Curtis, who are willing to pay for a convenient, guaranteed parking spot that can also be used like the vanity license plates some of them have on their cars.

In just its fourth annual parking place auction, Granite Hills’ senior class raised $8,996 this year by auctioning 75 parking places to seniors at prices that ranged up to the $205 spent by Scott Burns for spot Number 1--a corner space adjacent to just one other vehicle.

“It’s by the quad. It’s where the action is,” said Senior Class President Ken Weyand, who organized this year’s auction. “Not to mention that there’s only one side your car can get dinged on.”

While common underclassmen and other seniors battle for open spots in the lot or park hundreds of yards down Madison Avenue, “you can come to school any time and fly into your parking space,” Weyand said. “It’s yours. No one can park there. It saves you time. It saves you tardies (penalties for lateness).”

Not every student touches up his parking space, but the Granite Hills parking lot is a patchwork of student artistry, all sanctioned by the school administration. There is a perfectly diagrammed basketball court in slot Number 32, owned by Brad Halte, a forward on the basketball team. There is a huge football helmet bearing the school’s eagle mascot in slot Number 40, where football star Tom Vardell parks his car.

Another space promises “Tight Buns in 501’s.” Sam Halabo parks his brand new BMW over a painting of the famous BMW logo. And in the back of the lot, three girls who arranged to buy parking spots 59 through 61 have painted a long ski slope topped by clouds that spell “Class of ’87.”

For students unable or unwilling to participate in the auction, Granite Hills leaves many other free spots in the coveted senior lot, and others on the street and in a “junior lot” farther away. Other schools do the same thing, but at Grossmont High School, which raised $1,600 in its first auction this fall, faculty and administrators admitted some uneasiness about the auction favoring wealthier students.

“That’s a real concern,” said Chris Morrissey, senior class co-adviser at Grossmont. “That was talked about and discussed. We just felt that . . . we could not ignore the amount of dollars that was being raised at other schools.”

Funds from the Granite Hills auction, held in September, will partially defray the anticipated $20,000 cost of the school’s senior prom, to be held in San Diego’s U.S. Grant Hotel.

“It’s the best fund-raiser a school could have,” said English teacher Barbara Brooks, who initiated the auction as senior class adviser four years ago. “It doesn’t cost anything. And it gives the kids something nice. It helps this awful problem of proms being so (expensive).”

Faced with perennial competition with underclassmen for funds, senior class advisers at other schools have adopted the parking auction to supplement less lucrative candy sales, breakfasts and car washes.

“The competition for dollars is just tremendous,” said Morrissey, the Grossmont High adviser. “As a class adviser, you’re constantly trying to raise money, whether it’s candy or cakes or other things.

“I don’t see how you can turn your nose up at that.”

El Capitan High and Helix High also held auctions this year, but the acknowledged king of the parking lot auction is Valhalla High, where 80 spaces brought in over $12,000 this year. The high prices reflect both Valhalla’s affluent students and a decade of tradition auctioning off parking spots, said Russ Boehmke, the school’s administrative coordinator.

Schools report few problems with students stealing reserved spots, but the artwork sometimes makes an inviting target. Granite Hills students suspect that someone from rival Valhalla was responsible for pouring pink paint on Vardell’s helmet before the October 10 football game between the two schools, Weyand said.

A group of students cleaned up, but decided not to retaliate. “We said, ‘We’ll just settle our score on the football field’,” Weyand said. “We blew ‘em out.”

Final score: Granite Hills 43, Valhalla 6.