New school year brings new faces at the crosswalk

Thestar.com
September 4, 2018
Alexandra Jones

As students made their way to school in past years, it wouldn’t be uncommon to be ushered across the street by a police officer filling in for a crossing guard. But this year, that’s changing.

Police officers will no longer be helping to stop traffic for kids from kindergarten to Grade 6 when crossing guards are not available --the Toronto Police Service has announced that security guards will be taking over the job so that officers are not tied up.

Crossing guards such as Said Abufarick, pictured here greeting a child on the first day of school in 2017, would be replaced by police officers on sick or leave days in the past. Now, they will be replaced by security guards.

“Hypothetical scenario, a crossing guard calls in sick, or can’t make it, or for whatever reason is unable to go to the location, how it used to work in the past (was) we would send an officer to fill in,” explained TPS spokesperson Sandra Buckler. “So that is obviously, for us, not exactly core policing, although everyone cares about the safety of children getting to and from school.”

This is a transitional year for the crossing guard program, which is currently run by TPS. Next school year, police will hand over responsibility for the program to the City of Toronto’s Transportation Services Division, which will be contracting the jobs out to two different companies. Those companies will be chosen via a Request for Proposals (RFP). That changeover was part of recommendations from the police department’s Transformational Task Force, co-chaired by TPS board chair Andy Pringle and police chief Mark Saunders.

Police say there are 600 part-time school crossing guards with the current program. Current guards will be given a shot at being hired by whichever companies are chosen by the city’s RFP.

“Having a police officer (as a crossing guard) just means that that police officer is not responding to priority calls and so for us it was an important step for us to return to core policing, to allow us to go where the public needs us the most,” Buckler said.

Security guards from the Neptune Security Services will be donning vests with a logo from their company and the words “Crossing Guard” on the back when called in to replace absent crossing guards through the coming school year. They will undergo the same screening processes and training that TPS crossing guards went through.

“I know for a fact that there were 84 crossing locations today that were filled with people from Neptune,” Buckler said Tuesday, the first day of school for Toronto children. “The partnership’s working really smoothly from day one, so we’re very excited.”

Between Sept. 1, 2017 and Jan. 10, 2018, Buckler said 1,858 hours of police service involved filling in for crossing guards. Back in 2015, according to the 2017 report, the backfill resulted in 3,138 hours of officer-time taken away from other duties, and the program that supplied officers to fill in had a budget of $6.8 million.

The new model of modernization for police is hoping to “place communities at its core, be intelligence-led, optimize the use of resources and technology, and embrace partnerships as a means of enhancing capacity and capability,” a police news release stated.

According to Eric Holmes, a spokesperson for the City of Toronto, the police service budgeted $8.8 million for the delivery of the back-up crossing guard program in 2017. The estimated annual cost for the Neptune security guards is $10.4 million, or an increase of $1.6 million.

“The higher cost is largely due to the current low but unsustainable program structure (hours and wages), unrecognized costs for police officer backfill for vacant crossing shifts, third-party service provider profit margins and staffing for City’s oversight function,” Holmes said.