In just a few weeks, the crossing guards donning bright yellow vests and wielding handheld stop signs at West Marin School won’t be volunteers: The Transportation Authority of Marin voted last week to fund a guard program at the school for at least the next two years, a boon for caregivers and school staff who see the crossing as dangerous but have struggled with a volunteer program.
“I’m so grateful,” said Peggy Day, who organized volunteers last year.
There had been no guards for at least a few years, and Ms. Day felt the crossing over Highway 1 posed major dangers to schoolchildren, particularly since the hill blocks views of oncoming cars and vehicles often speed by the school, sometimes more than 15 miles an hour above the speed limit. When the California Highway Patrol stations an officer nearby, they always nab a speeding motorist, she said. But the program was time-intensive, and when people couldn’t make their assigned shift—either an hour in the morning or an hour in the afternoon—she would often end up covering it.
“It was hard to get enough people,” she said.
The school applied for paid crossing guards through a decade-old Transportation Authority Program, which is funded mostly by a mixture of a half-cent sales tax and a $10 vehicle registration fee. Staffing each site costs about $16,000 per school year, but not every school makes the cut; of 145 sites that requested guards for the upcoming year, only the top 80 sites, which were ranked on numerous factors, will get one.
“We have a rigorous process for evaluating sites,” said Dan Cherrier, the authority’s principal project delivery manager. The program, which started in 2006, originally considered only the number of students using the crosswalk to select sites. (Rural schools are held to a different threshold than urban ones.) But the program was updated in 2009, and now the selection process also accounts for vehicle speeds, sightlines and whether the crossing already has safety infrastructure, like a stop sign or light.
The list of staffed sites is re-evaluated every couple of years. Mr. Cherrier said the hill that blocks the sight of oncoming traffic at West Marin was a significant factor in the school’s scoring, as was the absence of a stop sign.
Bolinas-Stinson Union School District has had a crossing guard through the program since 2014. Lagunitas School District received a paid guard in 2008 only to lose it in 2010, when Mr. Cherrier said a decline in the number of students using the crossing led the authority to prioritize other sites.
Guards are paid for two hours in the morning and two hours in the afternoon on school days, though they typically only work one hour per shift.
Contact Lynn Menard, the program’s supervisor at the transportation authority, at (415) 858.2148 or Peggy Day at (415) 608.2044 for information about how to apply.