Peck Slip School principal Maggie Siena said two families complained to her about the officer who was assigned to cover the crosswalk.
BY ALEX ELLEFSON
There’s just no substitute.
Some of the police officers assigned to fill in for short-staffed crossing guards at Downtown schools are shirking their responsibility to shepherd kids across dangerous intersections, according to parents and educators.
At the Community Board 1 Youth and Education Committee meeting on Sept. 13, Peck Slip School principal Maggie Siena said two families complained about the officer who was supposed to cover the crosswalk.
“We have someone [at the school], but he’s completely ineffective,” she told the committee. “He really did nothing. He was not looking at the street and laughing in his car.”
Siena said she approached the officer and asked if he could walk onto the street while the children crossed, but he told her he had been instructed to only step onto the roadway if there was “major congestion.”
The First Precinct began assigning officers and traffic agents to local schools last year in order to stand-in for crossing guard positions the city was unable to fill. However, some at the committee meeting said the substitutes were not measuring up.
The co-chairs of the Community Board 1 Youth and Education Committee, Tricia Joyce and Paul Hovitz, hear the concerns of parents and educators about the crossing-guard crisis at a recent committee meeting.
“We have the same situation at West St. for PS 89,” said committee co-chair Tricia Joyce. “She just stands there and blows a whistle and never steps off the curb. It’s a six-lane highway.”
She said she fears the worst without active crossing guards out in the streets stopping traffic for kids.
“I’ve watched 15 sixth graders run across the West Side Highway as the light went yellow to red,” said Joyce. “All it takes is for one kid to trip. The crossing guard should be standing in the street at that moment.”
The First Precinct, which is in charge of the fill-in crossing guards, did not return a call for comment.
Siena said the school had positive experiences with some fill-in police officers in the past, but Joyce said the issues brought up at the meeting demonstrate why the city must find a permanent solution instead of just plugging holes.
“The whole thing needs an overhaul. It’s not working,” said Joyce. “Everybody means really well and everybody is doing the best they can. But the fact that we don’t have trained crossing guards for our schools is ridiculous.”
Assemblymember Deborah Glick, who pushed for the NYPD to post officers at vacant crossing guard posts, provided a list to the CB1 committee showing that crossing guards are missing this year at eight of nine Downtown schools. Two are away because of health problems, one post is unguarded, and police officers or traffic agents fill the rest of the positions.
Part of the reason the city has so much trouble finding crossing guards for Downtown schools is the position’s low pay and unusual hours. The part-time job pays only $11.50 an hour for a maximum of 25 hours a week — while splitting the workday between morning and afternoon shifts.
Glick has proposed making the job full-time and finding work during the day so crossing guards wouldn’t have to twiddle their thumbs between shifts.
The lack of crossing guards became a priority last year after a driver plowed into a mother, and narrowly missed a group of schoolchildren, in a notorious hit-and-run outside the Spruce Street School during moring drop-off.
CB1 is also pushing for new traffic safety measures along West St. — partly in response to a cyclist recently struck and killed, but also to bring more order to the traffic in an area surrounded by four local schools.
The Department of Transportation has agreed to put a right-hand turn signal at Chambers and West St., where the cyclist was hit, and to study adding similar lights down West St., between N. Moore and Liberty Sts.
But the signal changes, like the substitute crossing guards from the local precinct, are still an inadequate half-measure to address the chronic shortfall in Downtown crossing guards, according to Joyce.
“It’s been a year and I can’t get over how difficult this nut is to crack,” she said.
