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The Honolulu Advertiser

Posted on: Sunday, August 11, 2002

EDITORIAL
Make streets safer for crossing guards

On top of other recruitment problems, Hawai'i is now afflicted with a shortage of paid, professional crossing guards for our schools.

At least 50 of 170 such positions with the Honolulu Police Department apparently are waiting to be filled.

How bad can the job be? If you have a free hour in the mornings and afternoons, enjoy the company of kids and are safety minded, why not apply? The job pays about $10 an hour. To qualify, you have only to graduate from a four-hour training session.

So why the reluctance?

The HPD traffic department blames the shortage on lack of interest in the community. There has to be a better answer than that.

Perhaps traffic has become so intimidating that no one wants to get in the middle of it. Consider the situation in Los Angeles, where two crossing guards have been killed on the job in the past year and several have been injured by motorists.

And in Annapolis, Md., police are assuming crossing guard duty at an intersection where a crossing guard was killed five years ago.

And if it is intimidating for adults, imagine what it must be like to the little ones trying to get across busy streets.

Nothing quite so drastic has occurred in Hawai'i. But we wouldn't blame people for being scared.

In a letter to the editor, one former crossing guard at Kapolei Elementary said that the area she patrolled needs a couple of traffic lights or stop signs, "not two crossing guards who are trying to act as human stop signs."

For her, the issue is "not more pay or a streamlined hiring process ... I realized my life was more valuable than $10.05 an hour."

We can certainly sympathize with her concerns.

Still, someone has to shepherd schoolchildren safely across the streets. Perhaps there are school campus members, including student assistants, who could train for and assume crossing guard duty.

Meanwhile, the city might want to look into adding more stop signs and traffic lights around schools so crossing guards don't have to act as human shields.

It makes little sense to wait until there is a preventable tragedy and then get cracking on a solution.

The time to deal with this is now.