Changes – including privatization, hiring more personnel or having school employees handle the work – could be coming to the crossing-guard program provided by the Fairfax County Police Department (FCPD).
The county has a “Cadillac” program for school crossing guards, but struggles to recruit employees, forcing county police to handle those duties and thus straining the department’s resources, assistant police chief Bob Blakley said July 23 at the Board of Supervisors’ Safety and Security Committee meeting.
Fairfax County – which has 199 schools and roughly 183,000 public-school students – employs part-time crossing guards assigned by the police department at a cost of $2 million.
If crossing guards cannot cover some of the posts because of insufficient staffing or other reasons, county police instead use on-duty officers or ones earning overtime. The police department’s overtime cost for this program is about $1.5 million.
The county has 164 crossing locations, which equates to 328 half-hour crossings every school day. The crossing-guard program has 62 authorized positions, but only 52 are filled and those workers handle about 240 crossings per day. Many work at multiple crossings to make it worth their while, Blakley said.
The police department covers about 88 crossings per day, which occupies the time of roughly half of the minimum 90 officers who must be on duty. Those officers must stick to the crossing areas during the assigned times and cannot respond to other incidents, including violent crimes, Blakley said.
County police in 2023 persuaded Fort Belvoir and the town of Herndon to cover their single school-crossing locations, but received plenty of pushback from Vienna town leaders regarding its nine crossing locations.
Vienna Police Chief James Morris told county officials the department did not have resources to handle those tasks and added that Vienna residents also were entitled to, and pay for, Fairfax County services. The county relented.
Blakley outlined several options for supervisors’ consideration, including:
• Privatizing the crossing-guard program by hiring an outside vendor, which would cost an estimated $700,000 to $1 million per year. Those funds potentially could come from the new stop-arm-camera program for school buses.
“Our costs far exceed those under privatization,” noted deputy county executive Tom Arnold.
• Working with the school system to train administrators, staff or school security to handle those tasks. Alternately, the school system could re-evaluate its walking and bus routes with an eye on reducing the number of places that would require crossing guards.
• Keeping the program within the police department, which likely would necessitate the hiring of 20 more crossing guards at a cost of $700,000, bringing the total price tag to $2.7 million.
Under this option, county police also recommended changing school-crossing criteria to eliminate excessive, including most serving middle and high schools, and conducting a regional pay study to ensure competitiveness.
Fairfax County’s starting pay for crossing guards is $16.58 per hour, while Prince William County’s is $17.55 and Loudoun County’s is $19.56. Arlington County tops off the starting-pay list at $20.13 per hour, while Alexandria is last at $15.60.
FCPD’s Traffic Division evaluates crosswalk locations. To qualify, crossing areas must serve at least 13 students and be transited by 25 vehicles every five minutes at elementary-school locations and 30 vehicles each five minute in middle- and high-school areas.
County police presented a comparison of crossing-guard programs in six other U.S. localities.
Raleigh, N.C., came closest to Fairfax County, with 157,000 students and 192 schools, but had only 40 crossing locations and a police force with 802 officers (Fairfax County has 1,484). Raleigh uses part-time crossing guards with sworn officers as backfill, but does not authorize police overtime for that purpose.
Virginia Beach uses part-time crossing guards to cover 37 crossings for 37 schools serving 66,000 students. Its police department staffs uncovered crossings with pre-hire police cadets and sworn officers, but notifies the school district if staffing shortages preclude the agency from being able to do so.
The remaining localities cited do not have police cover school crossings. Arlington, Texas, and Milwaukee use city workers as crossing guards, while such duties are handled by the school system in El Paso, Texas, and by a private company in Miami.
Supervisor Kathy Smith (D-Sully) was “very supportive” of privatizing the program.
“We are at a time, with all the things we want to do, that we have to look at things differently,” she said.
But it was not a universal view.
Supervisor Patrick Herrity (R-Springfield) wanted police to continue running the crossing-guard program, saying it was a public-safety issue.
And “a person driving around responds differently to someone apparently wearing an FCPD uniform,” acknowledged Board of Supervisors Chairman Jeff McKay (D).
Supervisor James Walkinshaw (D-Braddock) inquired whether Virginia authorizes localities to employ police personnel between sworn and auxiliary officers to handle such duties.
While county police do not use cadets at school crossings, the department sometimes has parking personnel do so, Blakley said.