Fayetteville City Council tables plan for high school parking garage, set to revisit

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. (KNWA/KFTA) — The only public high school in Fayetteville is asking the city for help as it works to solve a growing issue.

In March, plans to construct a parking garage at Fayetteville High School were proposed.

According to reports, Fayetteville High School currently has 2,900 students enrolled in grades 9-12. About 1300-1800 of those students are eligible to drive to school, and with that comes a lot of traffic.

“Certainly during drop-off and dismissal times we have a heavy load of traffic around the campus,” said Superintendent Dr. John Mulford.

Mulford says the biggest issue facing the school right now is the fact that it only has 550 student parking spots, and it’s running out of options.

“Our only option is to look at adding a parking garage. So that’s something we’ve been working on. Our board has approved moving in that direction,” said Mulford.

When Fayetteville Public Schools first presented its proposal, three locations for the garage were listed. However, the area on the west side of the building is the only option that would allow the school to keep using all of its current parking spots during construction, but that area has some roadblocks to get through before construction can begin.

“One of the components of the site location we’re exploring is that it currently contains a tree preservation easement with seven large mature oaks,” said Mulford.

The district presented its updated plan to the Fayetteville City Council Tuesday night, but it was tabled until the next meeting on September 17 at the district’s request. Fayetteville Public Schools says at that meeting, it plans to request the city to allow them to relocate its trees to a different area on Fayetteville Public Schools property.

Council Member Sarah Moore says the area is part of an ordinance to maintain green spaces in Fayetteville.

“Tree preservations are not taken lightly, and the city of Fayetteville — whenever these are set aside — it’s a very rare occurrence in the city of Fayetteville that those are vacated,” said Moore.

However, Moore says she sees both sides of the problem.

“We’re really trying to facilitate and figure out how to create better equity for students being able to access coming on and off campus as they have different family needs, either to help with siblings, to get to jobs, to get to extracurricular activities that they have,” said Moore.

In total, the garage would add 460 spots, bringing the school’s total to over 1000.

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