Crossing guards are hard to miss: They wear reflective vests and carry those big red stop signs.
They’re usually stationed at street corners near schools, like McKinley Elementary in Corona Heights. But this year, started off a little different.
"Within a day or two of school starting, parents were noticing that there was only one crossing guard at our school," said Luke Bornheimer. He's a McKinley parent and runs a street safety nonprofit called Streets Forward.
According to the Chronicle, McKinley is one of 21 schools that started the year missing one or more guards.
"This is something that should be fully funded and fully staffed immediately," said Bornheimer.
SFMTA runs the crossing guard program. The agency is expected to be in a 322 million dollar budget deficit by next summer. At the start of the school year, it had 40 unfilled crossing guard roles. But now it says it’s working to fill the positions.
The crossing guard program is relatively inexpensive. It costs 4 million dollars a year — just a fraction of a percent of SFMTA’s 1.5 billion dollar budget.
"It's a drop in the bucket of the budget," said Jennie Smith-Camejo, communications lead at the crossing guards' union. "I don't understand why it continues to come up as being such a flashpoint given the small numbers and the fact that it is important to public safety."
John Yehall Chin Elementary in North Beach was one of the lucky schools this year.
Allen Lee, the school's principal, says the crossing guard who works outside John Yehall Chin has been there for at least 15 years. Her name is Ping.
"She's very much part of our school community in every way," he said. "We can't imagine not having a crossing guard."
But this isn’t the first time the crossing guard program has been at risk. In February, the SFMTA board considered cutting it entirely, but decided to keep it after public outcry.
It’s the end of the school day when I arrive at John Yehall Chin. Parents, like Sofia Bayawa, are waiting to pick their kids up. Bayawa tells me she's glad to have Ping stationed outside the school.
"There is a problem with speeding on the street, people running red lights," she said.
From Ping's position, at the corner of Montgomery and Broadway, she keeps careful watch on the traffic, calmly walking with families across the intersection, holding out her stop sign, and asking them about their day.
SFMTA says it expects to fill empty crossing guard roles by the end of 2025.
