Grade 3 students complain to Toronto mayor about collapsed bridge

TheStar.com
March 15, 2019
David Nickle

It has been five months since the students of Crescent Town Public School lost the footbridge that connects their school to most of their homes.

The bridge, which is owned by Pinedale Properties and the Toronto District School Board, partially collapsed in November 2018, and has still not been replaced.

After five months of scrambling down steep ramps or risking unsignalized road-crossings between the highrise neighbourhoods to the south and the school to the north, students, teachers and parents have had enough.

So, the Grade 3 class, headed by teacher Mariela Sirizzotti, wrote to Pinedale Properties’ CEO Alexander Grossman, the Toronto District School Board’s project supervisor for the area and Mayor John Tory, as an exercise in writing formal letters.

In one letter to Tory, signed by a student named Ehan, it said: “I am worried about how slippery it is for students to walk on the street to get to school. They might fall down and get hurt and get hit by a car. If we had the bridge, we wouldn’t be hit by cars.”

In another letter signed by a student named Sam, the writer quoted Tory’s tweet in November, which had promised to look into the inspections that had been done on the bridge prior to its collapse.

“So, Mr. Tory, what did you find out?” he wrote.

Three weeks after sending the letters out, the class received nothing from Pinedale, an acknowledgement from Tory’s office, and an update from the school board. The TDSB said it had agreed in principle to share costs proportionately with Pinedale, and that there is a tender process ongoing and Pinedale has hired a consultant to do the design work.

Sirizzotti said that reassurance is cold comfort for the 18 children in her class.

“They say, what if we had been walking on that bridge? They could have fallen, they could have gotten hurt, someone could have died,” said Sirizzotti.

Currently, students have few options for reaching the school from the highrise neighbourhood of Crescent Town. The best route is a steep ramp between buildings, owned by Pinedale, that crosses a narrow service road and leads directly through the school’s fenced-off kindergarten play area. Otherwise, students and their parents can make their way across a private roadway that winds underneath where the bridge once was.

“If there is a thought of not putting that bridge up, we need to find a safe way for kids to come to school from Crescent Town,” said Razia Rashed, a member of the school’s parent council. “Accessibility-wise we need to think about them.”

According to Principal Harpreet Ghuman, the school has been unsuccessful in its requests to obtain a crossing guard.

“We have worked with the city and we have worked with the police --according to them we don’t meet the requirements for having one,” said Ghuman.

Ghuman said that the path between home and school is so arduous for so many students that the office is changing its policy for issuing late slips.

“Is it really valuable giving children and families late slips when they’re trying to get there on time but their major access route is not there?”

Ghuman said he’s been trying to help the community and the students articulate their anger.

“One of the questions we’ve had (from the community) is if this was a rich community this wouldn’t happen,” he said. “I say, why do you think that? The point is you still have to persist and overcome that, whether through media or more letter writing, more noise and more social action.”

Calls to Pinedale’s Alexander Grossman were not returned before our publication deadline.

Tory’s spokesperson Don Peat said in an email that the mayor’s office had received six letters from students and was working on a response that would update them on the progress.

Peat wrote: “Because this bridge is on private property, the Mayor reached out to Pinedale Properties when this incident happened and was assured they would be doing everything possible to get a new bridge up.

He said the mayor will be following up with the property owner again to make it clear that a fix is needed as soon as possible.

Peat added that the mayor will be supporting Councillor Brad Bradford (Ward 19 Beaches-East York), who brought forward a motion to look into both the bridge collapse and how the city might better deal with privately-owned essential infrastructure.

In an interview, Bradford noted that he had also held his first major community meeting of the term in Crescent Town to largely address the matter of the collapsed bridge.

Bradford said he would be reaching out to the school community to try and find better interim measures to ensure safe access to the school --including trying to arrange a crossing guard.

“I’m going to work on it absolutely ... I’m happy to work with them on the crossing guard process.”

Bradford, a former Toronto city planner, said he shared the community’s frustration with the amount of time the bridge has been down.

“Five months is a long time for the community and children and parents at the school, but I think when we look at this in comparison to a lot of infrastructure projects, it’s not nothing ... it’s not putting in a bike post. That’s an elevated structure linking two plazas. Turning that around in the winter, it’s not surprising it’s been five months. But that doesn’t mean it’s acceptable and it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have a better interim plan.”