Blue State Blues: Queens Parents Struggle to Get Crossing Guards After 2 Students Killed in Traffic
27th September 2024
There’s only one official crossing guard at P.S. 127, the Aerospace Science Magnet School in East Elmhurst, Queens. But every morning, Stephen Cameron, a 78-year-old grandfather of four kids at the school, dons an NYPD hat and neon yellow windbreaker with a police patch and voluntarily guides children through traffic.
“The most important thing is for them to cross here and get security for them,” said Cameron, who is retired from his job as a detective in Trinidad and Tobago. “All the buses come at the same time, everybody getting out at the same time … it makes it a little hectic.”
Not only hectic, but sometimes also tragic: Two students at the school have been killed in traffic in the last two years. They were each walking with a parent near school, navigating a neighborhood full of tricky triangle intersections where parents say it’s hard to figure out who has the right of way as drivers speed through. Just blocks away, kids navigate busy Astoria Boulevard, where they must often dart across multiple lanes of traffic to catch the bus.