Stop, Drop and Roll

05 September 2008 | AUSD, Alameda City Council, Alameda Community, Tranpsortation | John Knox White

There are so many things to write about that sometimes I can’t write about anything. So today, I ignore my plans and talk about my morning.

School started this year with a reduction in Crossing Guards for the schools. This is the result of the city’s budget shortfall. A quick overview, unlike most crossing guards, Alameda’s are paid for by the city, not the school district, and they work for the police department. Up until the latest chool year, the city was paying $325,000 a year for crossing guards, but when push came to shove, when the budget had to be cut, tradeoffs were identified: continue the current level of school guardianship and fire a full-time officer, or make changes to the crossing guards and keep the officer. (I don’t think the tradeoff was especially difficult, Alamedans love their officers!)

So this year, for the first time in a while, there are no school crossing guards at the middle schools, and there have been cut backs where there used to be 2 crossing guards, now there is only one, and the hours that the guards who remain have been shortened.

Which brings me to my morning. A number (ok, it was three) of parents with kids going to Lincoln Middle School mentioned that they were concerned about kids crossing Fernside without a crossing guard. Traffic on Fernside is heavy in the morning, a lot of it parents driving to drop off kids at school and then u-turn their way back to Bay Farm.

So I went down to see what’s happening there the last couple of days.

Yesterday (Thursday) I was thwarted by Vice Principal Michael Han, who had donned a yellow vest and grabbed a stop sign and was playing the part of “official crossing guard.” Everything was running smoothly. It turns out, AUSD is trying to figure out if there are any liability issues surrounding a volunteer parent crossing guard program, and so one can’t be set up immediately. But beyond that, there’s concern that there won’t be any volunteers.

So today (Friday), I headed over earlier, Mr. Han let me know that he doesn’t head out with his sign until about 7:45. My dreams were answered (ok, they weren’t dreams, not even hopes, more like “I hope I don’t waste my time”s). Traffic, kids, no crossing guard. And the Chief of Police showed up to boot!

After watching kids cross for 20 minutes, I don’t know what to think. My gut reaction is that middle schoolers can cross the street safely without crossing guards, but I think that within that is the idea that the drivers are rational, compassionate beings, and not all of them are. At one point, I screamed (more of a yelp really) as some idiot in a BMV SUV tried to race through the crosswalk ahead of a kid and nearly creamed him. Hard stop, 5-8 feet from the kid. Not the kids fault he had started crossing a long time before and the driver had slowed down for him. Drivers in big rushes are a danger to everyone.

But the other side of the coin is that 98% of the drivers stopped as soon as they saw kids, and the kids were really well behaved, waiting until all the traffic had stopped, in both directions, crossing respectfully. No problems.

There’s no perfect solution, but its one that folks are going to need to ponder for a while.