As the snow melts with spring right around the corner, more and more heaps of trash are uncovered.
Along with the school year progressing, students are getting lazier as chucking a fast food bag out of their car seems easier than walking to one of the garbage cans posted around the school’s entrances.
“There are garbage cans at every building entrance,” dean and head of parking at Huntley High School, Chris Klein said. “There are garbage cans pretty much everywhere on the exterior of the building, but we don’t have any garbage cans in the parking lot itself.”
Students are becoming more careless in the lots, and it shows with the mass amounts of garbage collected around the student parking lots.
Huntley is well taken care of by the high school’s staff and faculty, and now it’s the students’ turn to put in the little effort expected to take care of their belongings.
Not only does this garbage impact the environment, but also the parking lot conditions.
“Most of the time, I see people being very reckless,” junior Tylar Caddick said. “Mostly in their cars, just eating and then throwing out the wrappers, and then a lot of people just do not have any courtesy for the others walking.”
With students dumping trash right in front of others, it is clear we have gotten more comfortable with littering and disrespecting the lots. It’s gotten to the point that the garbage and heaps of litter are occurring on other people’s properties.
As Klein discusses, from coaching baseball at Huntley, the littering problem has been ongoing.
“We were doing a little run around campus, and I noticed right by the farm field, just so much garbage accumulating around the farm field, which is not even our land,” Klein said.
Students throw away their Starbucks drinks and McDonald’s bags without really knowing where it ends up.
This problem is worse at the end of the year when students dread the extra seconds it takes to throw out their garbage as the weather becomes brisk.
“At the beginning of the school year, people were cleaner and nicer, but as the school year has gone on, it seems like people do not care as much and do whatever they want,” junior Autumn Surman said.
Cars run over cups filled with soda sitting along the road, or students step in food left out from the morning lying on sidewalks that are carelessly discarded.
“Instead of being reckless and thinking they can do whatever they want, just have some respect for the other people,” Caddick said. “Instead of eating in their cars, eat at the restaurant.”
There is no excuse for leaving your trash in these lots. It isn’t hard to walk those extra five steps or eat at the restaurant if you don’t want to spend extra time in the cold.
For all the staff does for us at Huntley, the least we can do is show a little respect by picking up after ourselves; not dumping our garbage everywhere but the garbage cans.
