Florida Institute of Technology professor Dr. Greg Spencer worked with his dual enrollment entrepreneurship class to address parking lot renovations with Holy Trinity’s Upper School administration. Students were given an innovative design project and prompted to figure out ways to make improvements on campus. After discussing this topic with Dr. Katherine Cobb and other administrators, Corina Gumm, a Brevard County traffic operations engineer, was contacted and helped the students to fully analyze the entries and exits of the parking lot area. 

Dr. Spencer’s class takes ideas, develops them to form innovations, and learns to market them by using principles of entrepreneurship. 

“Our purpose in this class is to innovate ideas that make products and services to meet people’s needs and set up businesses to make profit,” said Spencer. 

Although the students do not have control over the traffic lights, they created a survey that discussed traffic flows before entering campus and on campus. 50 percent of students said getting around the parking lot is an issue, especially for young drivers. The class hypothesized that the issues were external and in relation to the timing of the traffic lights for vehicles entering campus from Pineda West and North Wickham. On the contrary, results from the survey showed that people are happy with the timing of the lights in addition to the overall usage of the carline system. 

Dr. Spencer utilized a conceptual development method in the class to prompt students to create a presentation for the administration showing their parking lot renovation ideas. Students were not given a budget for these renovation ideas and therefore inspired administration to consider moving forward with the improvements. 

Students presented a potential solution: paving the lot in the back of the main parking lot. This would remove the potholes in that area, but administration pushed back on that idea due to the fact that the water drainage will need to be taken into consideration as well as parking spots could be lost. 

The current grass lot permits students to park with freedom. But if exact spots are defined, then parking spaces may be lost. Junior Garrett Tinker suggested in his presentation that the grass area can be landscaped to remove the potholes. There was additional discussion to move the faculty parking lot to provide juniors and seniors priority to choose their spots. Administration has taken all of these suggestions into consideration for future renovation.