Profile: The Crossing Guard Everyone Knows

Minneapolis runs its school crossing guards through the Safe Routes to School program, a city and state effort to make it safe for children to walk and bike to school. The guards train for the job, then hold the post in all weather. On bitter mornings, when everyone else is hurrying head-down, a guard is at the corner with vest on and arm raised, exactly when a parent most wants a reassuring presence for a small child crossing a cold street.

The role sits where two things this neighborhood values meet: its schools and its walkability. Kenwood Community School, at 2013 Penn Ave. S., draws children who walk to class, and those walks depend on safe crossings at busy corners. The daily greeting, the recognition, the small exchanges repeated morning after morning add up to a consistent adult presence outside the family, the kind that helps a child feel the neighborhood is paying attention.

It is easy to take such a fixture for granted precisely because it is so reliable, until one imagines the corner without it. When budget conversations turn to cuts, the least celebrated positions, the guards, the aides, the lunchroom staff, are often the ones families would miss the most.

[unverifiable: an earlier version framed this as a profile of one beloved crossing guard, but no specific guard, school corner or quote could be confirmed; it runs here as a sourced appreciation of the crossing-guard program rather than a named profile, with no invented details added.]