Alice Smith Crossing Guards See Traffic Troubles First Hand

On Monday afternoon, Alysha Baugaldt was a small girl surrounded by big vehicles.

The fifth-grade crossing guard held back sedans, minivans and SUVs while even bigger buses passed just feet away. A small stretch of concrete to the south, other crossing guards stopped even more vehicles passing on well-traveled Minnetonka Mills Road.

“It gets pretty busy,” Alysha said. “It’s actually more exciting than when no one comes at all.”

This summer, Hopkins plans to radically transform the streets around Alice Smith. New traffic patterns and safety features, like improved crosswalks, are all designed to bring order to an area that can become a mess at the beginning and end of the school day. No one is in as good of a position to know just how confusing the traffic situation is as the elementary school’s student crossing guards.

“It’s crazy,” said Faustino Chavez Martinez, a fifth-grade crossing guard.

Alice Smith has 88 students in the crossing guard program, with 10 on duty each shift. The fluorescent-orange-garbed students escort pedestrians across streets and stop traffic whenever buses pass.

“The drivers listen well. The kids will change their minds sometimes,” Alysha said.

Drivers were well behaved on Monday, but that’s not always the case.

The students take down license plate numbers of drivers who don’t follow the rules and send the information to police, said Pat Stacken, a learning support teacher who supervises the crossing guards. The Police Department then sends those drivers a warning letter.

The kids are also extremely aware of whether drivers are doing anything else risky, such as talking on a cell phone while driving through the school zone—although sometimes they also ask to write up people for smoking, she said.

“The kids love to do that because they feel like cops,” Stacken laughed.

Yet driver misbehavior is a real worry. Stacken estimated that students notify the police department of two or three driving violations per week.

Both Stacken and the students said the area’s biggest challenge is the Ninth Avenue intersection where vehicles come together from five directions. This year’s project would realign Minnetonka Mills Road so that it dead-ends at Ninth Avenue, making it simpler pattern that Stacken welcomes.

“It’s really crazy. It’s a busy, busy spot,” she said.

Said Alysha: “If it’s your first time, then you won’t know where your place is.”

Sixth-grader Scott Post—whom Alysha called the experienced one of Monday’s crossing guard crew—said he doesn’t get nervous or find the job hard because he had experience as a crossing guard prior to this semester. But he conceded that the area around Alice Smith is busy when school starts and ends and that traffic conditions could be better.

“People come in and out, in and out, in and out—and then so do the buses,” Scott said. “It’s kind of not really good.”