Walking through the hallways without getting pushed or shoved has proved to be a near impossible task this year. Although the hallways have been overcrowded for years, it seems that this year, the number of people has doubled.
Hallways and staircases are stuffed with students and they are far from orderly. Being bumped by walking down the halls is a regular occurrence while walking through the mobs.
Some of the most common annoyances to students are having to maneuver around large congregations of people. In some of the most heavily trafficked areas of the hall, students will gather in groups, making it extremely difficult to go by. Students and staff alike are plenty annoyed by these congregations.
Administration has attempted to implement some fixes to this problem, such as one-way staircases. However, the signs that say “down only” are almost always ignored. Going down one of these smaller staircases with people squeezing by going the opposite direction is uncomfortable to say the least.
Additionally, a whole new cluster of portables has been added, which in theory solves the problem of too many students, but the traffic going to the portables may be the worst. With one main staircase leading to the portables and a mob of students exiting and entering between every period the congestion is worse than ever.
Unfortunately, there really are no quick solutions to this problem but the long-term solution is slowly coming to fruition. The new Woodward high school which will account for the Tilden half of the WJ population is a hopeful solution to this overcrowding.
Since we are stuck with overcrowding for a few more years, it’s important to find shortcuts by walking in less utilized halls, watching out for other people around you when walking down and avoiding grouping up in the halls. The overcrowding is manageable if we all try to make the halls less of a mosh pit.
