The day before school started this year, Bruins who drive regularly participated in a festive evening of personalizing their new parking spots. They painted designs to distinguish themselves and show their spirit.
That very night, an unknown person or group vandalized five Bruin football player parking spots with inappropriate designs and spray paint. The vandalism raised the question of whether Leadership’s parking space ritual was a good idea for future school years.
Senior ASB President Bella Batula doesn’t think that this event will impede ASB’s future plans.
“We don’t like of scrapping the idea because it was such a good idea, and a lot of people benefited from participating in the parking spot thing, but it definitely put a damper on how we approach things,” Batula said. “There’s really no way for us to truly prepare mentally, we don’t know what someone is going to do. If somebody decides ‘Hey, I’m going to break this that or the other,’ you don’t want to just take it away from everybody, you want to allow (them to still appreciate the parking spot event). So, we haven’t necessarily came up with a solution, considering there really isn’t one, but we do plan to continue with the parking spot deal, because it brings a lot of money to the school.”
Senior ASB Vice President Cat Renner also commented on the vandalism and it’s impact on their parking spot plans. Renner said she believes jealousy played a part in the vandalism.
“It really does I think (affect how we will do this in the future), but on the other hand I think that if the person really wanted that parking spot, if they vandalized it for that reason, if they just wanted it, then they should have bought the parking spot for themselves,” Renner said. “So, that’s probably a reason why somebody vandalized in the first place.”
Even though this event was malicious towards the students whose spots got painted, Renner thinks they handled it well.
“Honestly I think it’s poor sportsmanship. … It shows bad integrity on our school,” she said. “I don’t know if it was our school or somebody outside our school, but I just think that our students with the parking spots that got vandalized, they reacted pretty well to it. They didn’t really do anything vicious.”
Bear River’s Vice Principal Cathy Peterson explained her reaction when she heard about the vandalism.
“I was bummed, people spent a lot of time on them,” she said. “They took a lot of pride and had a lot of fun (painting the spots).”
After spending at least eight hours looking at security footage, Ms. Peterson did not find any information to help direct her to a suspect.
“At this point, I’m not even sure they were our students,” Mrs. Peterson explained after her extensive search.
The students who were affected by the painting were very disappointed when they saw their spots had been destroyed. Senior Kaden Ahlberg was one of those students. He elaborated on his feelings when he saw his parking spot.
“It didn’t feel very good,” Ahlberg said. “It was like the first day of school. We went out Senior Sunrise and we all saw our spots painted over. We just thought it was pretty cool that we could paint our spots then someone ruined it for us.”
Stephen Taylor, another senior who had his parking spot ruined, thinks whoever painted their spots had an ulterior motive.
“We think it was, because it was all football players that got their spots ruined, so we think maybe someone did it because of that,” Taylor said.
Even though this event occurred on Bear River property, Ms. Peterson won’t blame students until she has concrete evidence.
“I’m always going to put my faith in the kids,” she said.
