Which schools get to have crossing guards? Here’s how LA is changing the system

The city of Los Angeles is overhauling how and where it places crossing guards before the start of the upcoming school year.

The L.A. City Council voted Wednesday to conduct a citywide assessment of elementary school crossings informed by:

• Safety data
• Equity measure
• And existing infrastructure

These metrics will now inform decision on where to place crossing guards. It's a significant change, moving the city away from its previous practice of only studying intersections where a school principal requested a crossing guard.

How we got here

The item passed with 11 “yes” votes. Council members Traci Park and John Lee voted against the update because they were concerned how it will affect current crossing guard assignments, and council members Bob Blumenfield and Adrin Nazarian were absent.

Laura Rubio-Cornejo, the general manager of the Department of Transportation, said at a committee meeting in June that the new approach will integrate the city’s crossing guard program into the same process it uses to evaluate the need for other school safety treatments, like speed tables and speed limit reductions.

“It would allow us to have a more comprehensive approach to addressing school safety that capitalizes and leverages all the different tools that we use to make the streets leading to schools safer,” Rubio-Cornejo said when the updated methodology was first considered.

While the updated methodology has generally been received positively for offering a more equitable and comprehensive distribution of resources, it’s still unclear if volunteers can fill in the gaps created by the city’s shortage of crossing guards.

The city has been able to place crossing guards at about two-thirds of the intersections requested, Rubio-Cornejo wrote in a budget memo this spring.

What’s changing

For years, school principals would request a crossing guard for an intersection around their school. Then, engineers working for the city would decide if a crossing guard was necessary based on the kind of intersection, number of lanes, speed limits and volume of vehicle and pedestrian traffic, according to the Department of Transportation.

In the June report, Rubio-Cornejo wrote that this system “inherently limits deployment…and may not address safety concerns at locations that have not been requested.”

To produce the new crossing guard assignments, the Department of Transportation will apply the same criteria it used previously to intersections within a 1,000-foot radius of all elementary schools — not just the ones identified by school principals.

The details

That’s the high-level description. There are a lot more details, but bear with us, it’s a bit complicated:

First, the Department of Transportation will extract elementary schools from a list of all schools within the city that it ranked by need of street safety intervention.

That list, which you can see starting on page 10 here, was created last year. It was based primarily on collision data. Other factors, including how the areas around each school scored on various socioeconomic, environmental and health variables, were also considered in the ranking.

Elementary schools, in ranked order, will then be categorized by geographic region. The purpose of this, according to the Department of Transportation, is to ensure crossing guards aren’t deployed to a different region than the one they were already assigned to.

The regions schools will be sorted into.

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City of Los Angeles

)

Within each region, intersections within the 1,000-foot radii of schools with higher need will be prioritized. For those intersections, the Department of Transportation will apply the same criteria it used in its previous approach to assign crossing guards.

So, for example, if there’s a high-ranked school in the Western region with two unmarked crosswalks, each with several lanes of fast-moving traffic and a high proportion of students who are pedestrians, that school could get two crossing guards.

Carlos Torres, the director of the L.A. Unified School District’s office of environmental health and safety, said updating the methodology is a “good move.”

“There’s a lot of positivity in it because essentially they’re looking at a number of different factors,” Torres said.

L.A. Unified School Board Member Tanya Ortiz Franklin, whose district includes South L.A., said she’s in favor of the “more strategic, inclusive, equitable approach.”

“Principals are not equally overwhelmed,” said Ortiz Franklin, who has led school safety initiatives for the county school system. “In higher need areas, there tends to be a lot more on their plate, and so they’re not always able to get to everything in the same way that a calmer, school environment might lead to.”

Old system fueled frustration

John-Ryan Shea was walking his third-grader to school in November when he heard the screeching sound of brakes followed by a thud on Avoca Street and Yosemite Drive.

When Shea turned around, he said he saw a girl “thrown about 10 feet” after a car hit her at the corner of Rockdale Elementary School, an arts-focused magnet school in Eagle Rock.

Luckily, the girl survived the collision and was doing relatively OK, at least physically.

“The one thing I‘ll just never forget is her face,” Shea said. “Just how absolutely stunned she was that she got hit by a car.”

According to an LAist review of state-level data, seven children ages five to 11 have been killed while walking on the street on a weekday between 2013 and 2022 in the city of L.A. There have been several more collisions in the same time period that resulted in injuries.

Rockdale parents had been campaigning to get a crossing guard at that intersection to no avail, despite warning that a collision like the one in November was bound to happen. Shea said drivers at the intersection regularly run through the four-way stop sign, and an LAist reporter observed that the stop and speed limit signs near the intersection are obscured by vegetation.

A public comment submitted about the new crossing guard methodology details more than two years of email communications between concerned Rockdale parents, local officials and Department of Transportation staff.

Today, the intersection is one of the nearly 240 in the city where, under the outgoing system, requests for crossing guards weren’t fulfilled.

The gray area of volunteers

A looming question about the city’s program is whether parents can volunteer to provide crossing guard services at locations otherwise not covered, like the one near Rockdale.

The city has said it is unable to administer a volunteer program itself while employing people to provide the same service because of labor rights issues.

The city added in its June report about the updated methodology that it could train volunteers that schools themselves manage to “augment the crossing guard program.”

That was news to Torres at L.A. Unified, who said the city has been “ very adamant there are no volunteer crossing guards.”

Torres, who LAist interviewed in June, added that the idea the city put forth about volunteers hasn’t been “vetted” by his office and that he hasn’t heard anything from the city on volunteer crossing guards that he can recall in “recent times.”

LAist reached out to the L.A. Unified to confirm there hasn’t been communication since the interview about volunteer crossing guards but hasn’t heard back.

It was only during budget negotiations in the spring, when the more than $10 million program was primed to be slashed, that City Council members learned it’s possible that volunteers can provide crossing guard services, as long as they’re managed by the school or school district.

“That’s the opposite of everything I’ve been told,” Councilmember Katy Yaroslavsky, who presided over the hearings, said. “I’ve talked to school board members who were very frustrated that they can’t [have volunteer crossing guards].”

Potential “heartache”

The crossing guard program emerged from the budget negotiations intact, which meant that Secorra Gagau, a Hollywood-based crossing guard supervisor, could expect to continue doing the job she loved.

“A lot of times, besides their family, we're the first face that [kids] see going to school,” Gagau said. “They are so excited to tell us about their morning and what they have planned at school.”

For Park, the connection communities develop with crossing guards was enough to vote against the updated methodology, which is likely to result in a reshuffling of resources.

“I just can’t explain to my constituents that we may lose crossing guards where they have long been deemed necessary and essential,” Park said in June.

Torres agreed that there will be “growing pains” if the city’s forthcoming evaluation determines a crossing guard is better served elsewhere.

“ It's gonna cause a little bit of heartache,” he said.

Why we are limited in evaluating the impact of the change

Neither the Department of Transportation nor the school district would send data on where crossing guards were placed last school year, despite multiple requests.

LAist believes it’s important to have that list to evaluate how the updated methodology affects where crossing guards are placed in the future, so that data is now being pursued through a public records request.

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