Julia Drossler, Copy Editor
Originally published December 18, 2015

Most of us cannot avoid taking the stairs during the school day. How else can we be expected to travel from class to class on time? The school has three main sets of stairs, all of which are used by students and most of which are unreasonably crowded.

Massive groups of students clamber around, pushing  and bumping, ensuring that they are part of the sometimes single-file line leading to their destination. Elbows hit elbows, toes get stepped on, irritable words are exchanged. This is the real passing period dilemma.

“I find myself going to the [outer] stairs to get away from the stairs in the middle of the hallway that clog up,” junior Alex Howell said. “You can see the block-up from down the hall.”

The stairs appear to be yet another facility that have been outgrown by the forever-increasing population of students. We have watched as our auditorium, classrooms and hallways have shrunk. The stairs have all but performed a magical disappearing act under the tide of students that struggle to use them everyday.

Students rush from their classes to make it to the stairs before anyone else, meaning that the least-crowded time to take the stairs would be the last two minutes of passing period.

That’s a problem, because nobody wants to sacrifice their punctuality for the chance to walk the stairs with their personal space bubble intact.

If the stairs are overcrowded now, what will it look like in five years when our student body increases?

“I guess there’s not really a way to fix it because we have 1,700 students trying to get to their classes all at once,” sophomore Karla Torres said. “I usually avoid the middle stairs because [they are] so crowded . . . I’m afraid that I’m going to fall back because it’ll just stop and no one [is] moving and it’s all crowded.”

Clearly, the middle stairs are the most troublesome. This is problematic, as the middle stairs are located in the closest proximity to most pods.

I have always imagined the halls of the school to be like an intricate series of veins and arteries, supplying students to and from classrooms as blood might be supplied to organs in a circulatory system. Therefore, if one such “artery,” namely, the middle stairs, were to become blocked, the entire system would malfunction.

Drastic times call for drastic measures. Perhaps the only solution at this point is quadruple bypass surgery.