With the new school year in full swing, many students are bothered by the hallway congestion. This school year, students are saying that the hallways seem more packed than last year. Last year, Rancho Cucamonga High School had around 3,400 students, and this year it has approximately 150 fewer students. With that many students and with the ongoing construction projects, the hallways are bound to be crowded during passing periods. But this level of congestion does not seem typical for second and third weeks of school. 

One of the reasons why the hallways are so crowded is because of new students struggling to find their classes and wanting to be close to their friends, leading to large amounts of congestion and blockage in the hallways. In particular, the stairs with three stories have the most congestion. 

“The stairs have a lot of people coming through them, so they can be hard to get up and down at times,” freshman Ethan Shapson said. 

When students are constantly late to class, excessive tardies can look bad on their record. Sophomore Imani Johnson said that because of the traffic, she has been frequently late to her second-period class.

Most of the congestion is on the staircase in the H building. Not only is it a staircase that goes to the third floor, but also due to the construction on the old library building, there is fencing around the textbook window, which drastically narrows the walkway. The fencing narrows the walkways for students. 

Senior Jadyn Conway Makeham said that students also tend to cause a lot of the congestion. 

“People just stand around and don’t move out of the way,” Conway Makeham said. 

Conway Makeham added that while it isn’t abnormal with the amount of stairs and people at RCHS, the congestion is still frustrating to deal with.