AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
Annie Mae Scott used to ride and keep horses on family land beside her home. These days, the horsepower comes from students’ cars parked on her property.
Read more A 71-year-old Wake County woman lets students park on her land. Now the town is suing her.
Scott says she is helping solve a parking shortage at Apex Friendship High School. The town of Apex has sued her to make the parking stop.
The 71-year-old woman says students began asking to park on her property after the school opened, followed by parents looking for spaces for their children. She has lived there for decades, before the school opened in 2015.
Meanwhile, more than 100 students remained on the school’s parking waitlist last week, and none of the alternatives explored so far has added enough spaces to eliminate the shortage.
Despite the lawsuit, on Wednesday there were 14 cars on Scott’s Humie Olive Road property as she continues to allow students to park there.
“Because this is my property,” Scott told The News & Observer. “This is my property.”
Scott works overnight as a nursing assistant. Her faith motivates her to visit sick people, help people in need and help the students, she said.
“I look out for them as if they was my kids going to school,” Scott said. She has a 41-year-old daughter and no grandchildren.
In the parking lot, students come and go. She says they have 30 minutes to go back home for lunch and come back.
Senior Lukas Hu, who moved from Tennessee last week, said he won a school parking spot through the lottery but cannot get his permit yet because he still has an out-of-state driver’s license. For now, he said he parks his white Volvo at Scott’s without paying.
Scott told The N&O that students are not required to pay to park on her property and that most parked for free last year, while others gave donations that she uses to maintain the gravel lot. She disputed a WRAL report that she charged $300 per school year, saying the figure was an off-the-cuff answer she gave at a town meeting.
But parent Rebecca Porch said Scott told her $300 was the charge for her daughter to park there this school year and that she paid it in August. Porch said the payment was made before she created a GoFundMe to help Scott with legal expenses and possible fines stemming from the parking dispute.
Scott disputed Porch’s account Thursday, saying the $300 was for legal expenses, not parking, and that Porch’s daughter could park for free.
Porch’s daughter was redistricted to Apex High but chose to remain at Apex Friendship. Porch said Wake County Public School System no longer provides her family transportation to the school. Her daughter plans to begin parking at Scott’s property next week.
If that option disappears, Porch said the family could probably carpool in the mornings but would still need to find transportation home because of after-school athletics.
Read more Big changes are underway at downtown Raleigh’s southern gateway
In its lawsuit, Apex says Scott’s property is zoned Rural Residential and that the town’s development ordinance prohibits student parking on residential property when the parking is not tied to the residential use.
“I don’t like for nobody to push over me, stomp me, walk over me,” Scott said.
The dispute dates back years. Apex first cited Scott over student parking in 2018. The town withdrew a 2019 violation after determining the parking wasn’t commercial, then amended its ordinance in 2020 to expressly prohibit student parking on residential lots. In November 2025, the Town Council voted unanimously to direct staff and the town attorney to initiate zoning enforcement against Scott’s property. This month, Apex sued Scott, seeking $3,700 in accrued penalties and a court order requiring the parking to stop.
Across Humie Olive Road, Greater Christian Chapel Church also offers paid student parking. Scott suspects the church complained about her parking.
“We did not start this. They can park in her living room. We don’t care,” Susan Croom, chair of the church’s trustee board, told The N&O. She said the church has existed for 160 years and paid its bills before students started parking there.
“We are commercial. We are not residential,” she said.
Town Council member Terry Mahaffey told The N&O that the church was properly zoned and met Apex’s development rules.
Wake County property records list both Scott’s property and Greater Christian Chapel’s parcel as Rural Residential. But Apex says the difference is how the properties are used: Scott’s is a single-family residential use, while the church is classified as a public and civic use. The town’s 2020 ordinance specifically prohibits student parking associated with residential uses, but not with churches and other public and civic uses.
Apex Planning Director Dianne Khin said the school was approved with 849 total parking spaces, 76 fewer than the town’s zoning formula otherwise required after staff concluded that number would be sufficient. WCPSS says 556 spaces are currently designated for students.
WCPSS spokesperson Michael Hyland said Friday that 110 students were waiting for spaces and that the district expects that number to decline as the year progressed.
Town Manager Randy Vosburg said the principal told him the school distributed parking spaces through two lotteries. The first for seniors, the second for seniors and juniors.
The school has 2,428 students, including 565 juniors and 678 seniors, according to WCPSS.
“She’s providing a service for kids who have cars and have nowhere to park,” Croom told The N&O.
Apex has explored other options.
Vosburg said the town considered roughly 100 to 150 spaces at two parks and shuttling students to school, but the idea never progressed.
Wake County Facilities Director Mark Forestieri said county land reserved for a future library was never studied for student parking, while Apex planner Katie Schwing said extending a proposed bus route to the school would lengthen the route and require another vehicle.
Meanwhile, Scott said, “I’m gonna stand for what I believe in.”
“I got a headache, but I let the Lord fight my battles,” she said. “The good always outweigh the bad.”
Read more NC election rules paused + Downtown Raleigh gateway transforms: Thursday’s top Triangle stories