Tourists will pay exorbitant prices for food and lodging during Sundance. They’ll even pay $500 for a high school parking pass, but ambitious students are barred from selling them.

Park City High School students have recently attempted to market access to their parking lot independently, through services such as ksl.com. The school administration responded with a sudden crackdown, asserting that they posses the exclusive right to sell passes to independent buyers.

“When you buy your pass it says on the form that it’s nontransferable,” said principal Hilary Hays. “It’s the same as a ski pass or a concert ticket.”

A high school is not a ski resort, however. It’s not a private business. Public schools are funded by tax money, and any schemes to derive extraneous profit demand a complete reevaluation of policy. Currently neither party has a valid claim to the lucrative parking retail.

Private business analogies work well in some respects. Scalping tickets and reselling rented items are illegal activities, and students cannot resell a nontransferable pass.

Yet while ski runs, concerts, and football games are open to the public, high school parking lots are only open to high school students. Some tourists have no right to park there. A government institution is not a commodity.

Administrators, however, have disregarded students’ free market instincts and established a monopoly on parking resources.

“We’re selling our passes for about $500,” Hays said. “The faculty decides how the money is spent. Most goes to teacher development, grants, or scholarships, but it could be a lump sum for something like marching band uniforms.”

To entrepreneurial high school students, who would rather spend the money at their own discretion, that’s a lot of cash. It is all spent on matters that students see as abstractions, or caught up in client politics that favor the band, for instance, over the entire student body.

While students have raised strong dissenting arguments that are soundly based on the tenets of individual responsibility and free information, legalistic interpretations do not concern them. Instead, they have an intangible moral objection to the administration’s policy.

“The school is so corrupt and sells the pass for $400 when we pay $50 to buy it in the first place and get $50 for selling it back,” said Senior Dillon Maurer, a student who attempted to sell his pass on ksl.

“And during Sundance not every [student] gets spots even if you keep your pass because they sell more passes than spots,” he added.

Although the school explicitly states its terms in legal print, there is still some vague notion that the administration is harboring secrets, or acting in a manner inconsistent with the views of those it was created to watch over.

Senior Aaron Green said, “The school should keep the money; after all we are renting it, but I believe we should have a say as to where that money is spent.”

Better communication is a good solution, but a passive one. Centralized decisions are the cause of the rift in trust between students and administrators. The school must either inform the student body of its plans, or acknowledge that their actions directly impact students, who have no control over the use of resources designed to benefit them.

High school students do lack the experience to completely control their future, but this doesn’t justify their total ignorance or their inability to express valid opinions. If a compromise is unattainable, then some money must flow to them.

“I think that the school should give each student who sells a parking pass the amount of money earned by the school from selling parking passes divided by the amount of students who sold passes,” said Senior Forest Sheehan.

The Park City High School administration has followed explicit legal standards, but it has violated ethical principles by profiting from a service specifically reserved for high school students and funded by taxpayers.

Sheehan found the obvious moral question raised by the school’s actions. “I don't want my school to be seeking profit,” he said.[b]
[/b]