TCAPS to overhaul West Senior High parking lot, driveway for $4.4 million

Parents, students and bus drivers who crowd Traverse City West Senior High School’s parking lot each school day are about to see a major change: Traverse City Area Public Schools is spending $4.4 million to rebuild the driveway and parking layout at 5376 N. Long Lake Road, a project the district says is meant to reduce crossing hazards and untangle one of its busiest traffic choke points.

The work is aimed at the daily friction points that have built up around the campus, where students and staff have had to cross main roadways after parking and where pickup and drop-off traffic has mixed with teen drivers, visitors and school buses. TCAPS says the redesign will create clearer crossings, markings and signage, while changing how people enter, park and move through the site. The broader plan also calls for relocating the existing high school exit and modifying internal circulation so the campus can run with one entrance and exit at the Herkner Road light instead of two traffic signals.

That shift is more than a pavement project. The Grand Traverse County Road Commission has also been seeking funding to modernize the signal at the TC West High School and Herkner Road intersection, underscoring how the school site has become a traffic problem as much as a school access issue. By eliminating one of the campus’s two traffic lights and consolidating traffic, the district expects a simpler pattern for parents lining up for pickup, buses turning through the site and nearby residents dealing with school-hour congestion on Long Lake Road.

Construction is scheduled to begin June 15 and finish before the next school year starts. TCAPS trustees unanimously approved nearly $10 million in bond projects in February 2025, and the West Senior High traffic circulation overhaul was described as a major reconstruction to be completed over the next two summers. That timeline suggests the district is trying to finish the most disruptive work while students are out of class, then return to a more orderly traffic pattern when the campus fills up again.

The project fits a wider TCAPS facilities strategy that has put site work on the same level as classrooms and roofs. In its 2024 capital bond materials, the district said planning was based on assessments and outreach surveys to students, staff, parents and the community, and that one of its major categories included 13 site improvements to driveways, curbs, sidewalks and parking lots. The district also said its 2024 bond proposal would keep the current 3.1 mills levy, a rate it said was 40% lower than the state average bond millage rate of 5.4 mills.

West Senior High has already been part of that broader investment cycle. TCAPS said in a 2025 public update that the campus’s Innovation and Manufacturing Center was funded through the district’s 2018 capital bond, a sign that the school has been moving through successive rounds of construction and modernization. The $4.4 million parking lot and driveway overhaul now adds another layer, this time focused squarely on safety, circulation and the traffic patterns families will feel every morning and afternoon.