West Cook News

At its Jan. 17 meeting, the Village Board of Hinsdale heard a complaint from a local student seeking better parking options around Hinsdale Central High School during the school day.

Eric Willoughby, a junior at Hinsdale Central High School, spoke during the meeting to ask the board to consider adding additional parking in the area around the school. Willoughby said he was speaking on behalf of about a dozen of his classmates, all of whom had all recently received parking tickets for the first time after they had parked on Washington Circle, a street about a 10-minute walk from the high school. 

After class, the students returned to find that they had all been given tickets despite not seeing any signs that warned against parking in the area. "There's not a lot of parking around Hinsdale Central," Willoughby said, adding that students couldn't afford to pay parking tickets.

"I would ask that you relieve that stress on students by just opening up some parking spaces near Central," he said. "There's no worse feeling than playing whack-a-mole every morning looking for parking spots and then having to go to school. It’s kind of annoying. And then coming back to your car and seeing parking tickets ... It’s not a fun time."

Willoughby said that while students hadn't seen any "no parking" signs that morning, they had later noticed signs that barred parking between 7 and 9 a.m. He added that the school does not have enough parking for its entire student body, and that while the school takes applications from the seniors each year to park in the student lot, there are a limited number of spaces, and younger students are not allowed to park on campus during the school day. Instead, the rest of the underclassmen are instructed to park on nearby streets or ride a bus.

Police Chief Brian King told the board that police had recently received a complaint from a resident on Washington Circle about parking, and the new signs had been put up to address the problem. Village President Tom Cauley said the board would find out when the signs went up, and if they weren’t up before the students were ticketed, the village would work with all the students to resolve the fines. He also said that 25 new spots had been added the Community House for students, but he agreed that the extra spots weren't sufficient, adding that the board would seek to find a solution.