Parking continues to be free for the spring semester, a policy since Covid-19 restrictions closed down a majority of campus-based operations in March 2020.
The permits, which legally allow students, faculty, and staff to park on campus, may eventually present problems readjusting to school, if fees are re-instituted in coming semesters.
As students at Delta College adapt to Spring in-person classes, one has to ask the question: will we be financially ready for the costs that come alongside parking permits?
“Personally I like it, it allows me to be able to park without worrying about the monetary costs,” said Noah Moreno, Associated Student Delta College Vice President.
Campus accessibility is important when it comes to in-person classes. While fees including “Books and Supplies, Tuition, and Transportation” from the MyDelta, estimated cost of attendance, are layered on top of our parking permits; it can cause a financial burden to students at low-income households.
Free parking makes a difference for some students.
“And more accessible with people who don’t have resources to buy the parking permit, campus is accessible” says Noah Moreno.
As someone who’s pursuing their degree through Corona thee Stallion, I believe we shouldn’t pay for the parking permits at this time. However, with Covid-19, we shouldn’t pay for our parking permits later on. With waived fees being a temporary solution, it should be a permanent solution that eases the transition of adjusting to coronavirus and omicron. While Delta College is partially in-person, the majority of the courses are online. This feels like we’ve been robbed of our experience here at Delta College, it’s where we’re paying for a Netflix subscription to only get ads in between episodes.
Not only do we have to pay for e-books that have homework and lessons embedded into it, such as Pearson Revel or McGraw-Hill. We also have to pay and attend courses that are virtually similar to CrashCourse on YouTube. While many professors may improvise and adapt to this strange time, there are some courses that offer limited interaction between the professor and student.
“If you attend school, you should get some parking here. We already pay our dues for books and attending college. Parking should at least be free,” says Luka Vega, a student who’s attending in-person classes at Delta College.
Students navigating through Covid-19 and Omicron deserve the ability to get accommodating parking on campus. While Delta College may have resumed back to in-person classes, our college experience has been taken away because of this strange time.
In the Fall 2021, students had returned back to campus. For me, I attended an in-person course, called MCOM 1. While the parkings permits may have been waived for the Fall 2021 and Spring 2022 terms, we should continue this on. If we, in the future, enforce parking permits we’d only screw with the routines of students adjusting back onto campus.
While it’s fortunate that Delta College is back to in-person classes, it doesn’t help that the college experience will be a strange time.
“It’s kind of an accommodation give everybody a little bit of a break you know there’s a lot of stuff that’s kind of going on,” says Robert Di Piero, Police Chief of San Joaquin Delta College District. “The fact that the college courses went hybrid or online, so the decision was to ease up on it regarding the permits, I know it’s irregular but it gives a break in it, we just didn’t have a lot people on campus.”
When asked regarding parking citation costs, Di Piero referred us to San Joaquin Delta College’s District Police website.
A “no permit” violation is $33. The regular semester parking permit was $30 prior to Covid-19 running a rodeo through our lives.
While it may not be a hefty fee, however just like a lot of unpaid fees, these costs can pile on over the semester. Thankfully, these permits are not enforced for the Spring 2022 semester, however as we navigate through the years, future parking permits may possibly be enforced when things resume fully back onto campus.
However, with Covid-19 and Omicron impacting our daily lives, parking permits shouldn’t be enforced in the future. If Delta College can waive the permits for these two semesters, they can obviously waive them for the future.