By Ella Kate McCord
Mr. Arnold, who you might have seen during carpool at the MAC or directing traffic during a football game, has a lot more to his job than convincing parents to get off their phones during the carpool line.
With years of experience in the Atlanta police, he now patrols Lovett daily and makes sure that things run smoothly and we’re all protected.
His morning starts off with Lovett carpool at the MAC. He blocks off the road between the plaza and the MAC so that cars cannot pass through. “This is my carpool, I do it all by myself,” he says. Carpool runs from 7:15-8:30.
To give a little background on Mr. Arnold, he started off his career in 1979 working for the Dekalb Police department, where he worked for around fourteen months. He then worked with the Atlanta Police Department where he won two Blue Chief awards and 2 officer of the month awards.
After these jobs, he moved to Florida in 2000 to pursue a medical investigator job that he would stick with for 6 years until he began working for The Roberts Law Firm P.C. for thirteen years. When the owner of the company suddenly died, he needed a job, and his is when he came to Lovett. He thought that his time on the Riverbank was going to be temporary, but he really likes Lovett’s great retirement plan.
Now, Mr. Arnold is here five days a week, Monday through Friday, “unless they also ask me to come in on a weekend. I also help with the traffic and parking events for sporting events. Like Fridays, I work sixteen hours. 7 AM until 11 o’clock at night.” On days that we do not have school, he still patrols Lovett but “it is a lot easier.” He calls that his downtime. “Because there is so much going on when school is in session, I try to relax a little bit,” he says.
Lovett carpool is now a lot more organized than it used to be and moves more quickly because of a plan that Mr. Arnold came up with it. “I developed a traffic plan for the carpool, where I have three lanes in front of the MAC. They didn’t have anybody to do that, so now it is much more organized,” he says. This also made it to where there are fewer cars on Mount Paran.
One of the biggest issues in the carpool line is definitely the parents being on their phones constantly and not paying attention. “Even if I’m blowing my whistle, they are just really into their phones and I have to knock on the hood of their car,” he says.
After this, he moves on to “close the back gate at 10 am.” Morning and afternoon carpool can differ due to the weather conditions or whether or not there were accidents in the parking deck. “When we have a lot of rain, I monitor the flooding on the Carter field from the Chattahoochee river,” he says.
We all know that there are many accidents in the Lovett parking deck, especially the first week of school… and one of Mr. Arnold’s jobs is to draft the reports and take pictures of the damages done.
Along with dealing with all of the wrecks in the deck, he also monitors students coming and going. We all know about senior privilege and how they are the only ones allowed to leave to go get lunch.
Students who are not seniors have to provide a pink slip to be allowed to go and if they don’t have one, he enlists the help of someone else on campus who knows about keeping things running smoothly: Mrs. Angela Morris Long. Sometimes when they are leaving he will “put them on the phone and they have to talk to her about it.”
