Crossing guards can be hard to spot in Lower Manhattan, which has long suffered from a chronic shortage, but a new agreement with the NYPD promises that nine police officers and traffic enforcement agents will be permanently stationed at intersections around eight Downtown schools until new crossing guards are hired to fill the gap.
BY ALEX ELLEFSON
For the second year running, Downtown doesn’t have enough crossing guards to post around local schools.
As a stopgap measure, the NYPD will again have to assign traffic enforcement agents to oversee otherwise unguarded intersections when school resumes next month in order to cover another expected shortfall in the number of Lower Manhattan crossing guards.
The substitutes were first introduced last year in the face of the chronic shortage of crossing guards posted at Downtown schools. Police have had difficulty staffing the part-time positions — which splits the workday between morning and afternoon shifts and pays just $11.50 an hour for a maximum of 25 hours a week.
“Every year, it’s a gargantuan effort to staff these positions,” said Tammy Meltzer, a member of Community Board 1’s Youth and Education Committee. “We won’t know if a school will have crossing guards until the building opens. It’s always a great unknown.”
The NYPD partnered with the municipal employee union District Council 37 this summer to hire 120 crossing guards for the upcoming school year, which starts Sept. 8, but community leaders still don’t know if the effort will bear fruit, in part because local precincts no longer play a role assigning crossing guards to schools.
A policy enacted this summer consolidates authority over crossing guards with the NYPD’s School Safety Division. Assemblywoman Deborah Glick — who in March announced an agreement with the First Precinct find substitutes for nine crossing guard positions — said her office wrote to the mayor last week to ask about the new policy.
“Whenever there is a change, you have to find the right person to talk to. So we are in the process of developing an appropriate line of communication to ensure the understanding we had with the First Precinct continues,” she said.
Noting there are still a few weeks until school resumes, Glick said she is optimistic her office will find a contact at the School Safety Division and is hopeful the new policy will work.
“Crossing guards can get lost in the many responsibilities of the precinct,” she said. “I think putting them in the school safety division is attempt to link them more closely to the school.”
Downtown parents’ long-standing frustration with the crossing-guard shortage boiled over in May 2015, after a driver injured a mother and narrowly missed a group of children in a notorious hit-and-run outside the Spruce Street School during the morning drop-off.
In response to pressure from the community and elected officials, the First Precinct announced last November that traffic enforcement agents would safeguard unwatched intersections near the Spruce Street and Peck Slip schools. The station house expanded its use of substitute officers in March to cover nine intersections at eight elementary schools in Lower Manhattan.
An NYPD spokesperson said two more crossing guard locations in the First Precinct have been added for the upcoming school year, but did not say whether those positions had been filled.
Filling the vacant positions with traffic agents, or even patrol officers, is still only a stopgap measure, according to Glick, who said the city needs to make Downtown crossing guard positions more attractive to in order to find a long-term solution to the problem.
“Part of the challenge is that it’s a barbell job — meaning you work one end here and one end here, but there’s this open section in the middle,” she said. “And because Lower Manhattan is an expensive area, it’s difficult to recruit people who live near the school and can go home for an hour or two.”
The assemblymember said the city should consider expanding crossing guards’ responsibilities, such as supervising after-school activities or providing tutoring, so they can work throughout the school day.
She said making the job more appealing will not only help fill the vacancies, but ensure crossing guards will be a familiar presence at local schools.
“We want crossing guards to get to know the families, someone the kids can recognize when they’re welcoming them to the school,” she said.
