Oswego SD 308 officials eye more student parking at Oswego East

Prescott Mill single-family homeowner association president Nathan Brown asks the Oswego School District 308 Board of Education to create more student vehicle parking spaces at Oswego East High School, during a forum on May 16, 2022 at Plank Junior High School. (Mark Foster -- mfoster@shawmedia.com)

OSWEGO – Problems with Oswego East High School students parking their vehicles in the nearby Prescott Mill subdivision may be alleviated by a plan to create more parking spaces on the school grounds.

Oswego School District Superintendent John Sparlin and Chief Financial Officer John Petzke confirmed that the district is working to establish a new parking lot of about 80 spaces just northeast of the school building.

Nathan Brown, president of the single-family homeowners association for Prescott Mill, spoke before the Oswego School Board May 16 during a public forum at Plank Junior High School, urging the district to complete the project this summer.

“I’m here to ask for the quick approval of this project and to expedite its completion before the beginning of the new school year,” Brown told the board.

“This has been an issue Prescott Mill and the village have asked the school district to address for seven years now,” Brown said. “The safest and most appropriate place for students to park is on school grounds and the addition of these parking spaces would go a long way to solving this problem.”

Currently, about 70 to 90 student vehicles are parked in front of the single-family homes and townhouses along Prescott Mill’s streets on a typical school day, Brown said later.

Sparlin and Petzke said the potential parking lot site under consideration would be located between a baseball diamond located east of the school building and an access road running along the north side of the school property connecting to Harvey Road.

The school district does not yet have a cost estimate for the project, which would involve reconfiguring the access road to accommodate the parking lot. Sparlin said the work will require board approval.

Now, OEHS has slightly more than 1,000 vehicle parking spaces on the property, with about 650 reserved for students, Sparlin said.

Since the school building first opened, three parking lots with a total of about 500 spaces have been added as enrollment has grown over the years, Sparlin said.

In addition to the single-family homeowners association, there are two other associations representing townhouse residents in Prescott Mill.

Brown said all three of the Prescott Mill homeowner association presidents met with Sparlin, school board members and top village officials.

“At that time, we were told it’s possible to add 80 parking spaces to Oswego East and it would be added for consideration to the district’s list of capital improvement projects,” Brown told school board members.

“The soonest the project could be approved by the school board is July and the best case scenario is for the additional parking to be ready for the beginning of the new school year in August,” Brown said.

“A win-win is for students to have the ability to park safely on school grounds and not in our neighborhood, so we are hopeful the district will approve the project and move quickly,” Brown said.