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Mom flies into action over mix-up with guard
By MAUREEN BYRNE
© St. Petersburg Times, SEMINOLE -- This is a story about a woman who fixed a foul-up in the school district. Really fast. And that doesn't happen too often when one is dealing with a bureaucracy of 15,000 employees. When Christine Bush of Seminole found out Wednesday morning there was no crossing guard assigned for Starkey Elementary School students at 86th Avenue N on Starkey Road, she was astounded. On Wednesday, the first day of school, Ms. Bush and her 10-year-old daughter, Olivia Browning, a fifth-grader at Starkey Elementary, rode their bikes to the school on 86th Avenue, crossing busy Starkey Road. Ms. Bush had taken the day off from work. It was around 8 a.m., long before the 9:40 a.m. bell. Ms. Bush, 41, said she arrived at the school early to meet her daughter's teacher and to find out when the crossing guard would be posted at the intersection. "I work in Tampa, and she needs to get across that street without me," she said Thursday. She said she asked principal Kenneth MacKenzie what time the guard would be there. She said he told her he didn't know. So she asked the office staff if they knew. They said the school had received an e-mail from the district saying there would be no crossing guard at 86th Avenue for the elementary students because the children who lived in the neighborhood east of Starkey Road had been assigned to another school. But Ms. Bush knew that wasn't correct. Her own daughter lives in that neighborhood. It was true some of the streets had been zoned for Lakewood Elementary School in St. Petersburg, but some neighborhood kids still were attending Starkey Elementary, she said. At 9 a.m., a frustrated Ms. Bush began her ride home. At that time, Carl Gray was standing guard at the intersection. She said he told her he was assigned there for Osceola Middle School students who lived east of Starkey. Since the elementary and middle school students head to school at the same time, both groups of students would be covered. But it was the afternoon crossing that worried Ms. Bush. The middle school day ends later than the elementary school. Gray was scheduled to be at the intersection at 4 p.m., 20 minutes after the elementary students were dismissed. Unacceptable, Ms. Bush thought to herself. Gray gave her his boss' name and phone number. When she got home, she called Sharon Lough, a supervisor for the school safety officer program. Being the first day of school, Ms. Bush realized Lough probably wouldn't be at her desk. She wasn't, so Ms. Bush left a message. She didn't stop there. She called a Neighborhood Times reporter. She called some of her neighbors whose children attend Starkey Elementary and told them to call Lough. "We need action," she told them. "We need a guard on that corner." Marcel Duquette called Lough. The 35-year-old father has two daughters who attend Starkey Elementary: a 7-year-old second-grader and an 11-year-old fifth-grader. "If one child would have been hit, that would have been one too many," Duquette said. Lough returned Ms. Bush's call about 11 a.m. Ms. Bush said Lough told her she had been inundated with about 30 phone calls regarding the crossing guard. Lough told her it was a mix-up and a guard would be posted there for the elementary students that day and for the rest of the school year. When reached Friday, Lough told a reporter the oversight arose from a simple mistake. When her office looked at photocopied maps of the zoned areas, employees didn't notice a highlighted section of Ms. Bush's neighborhood -- the area that was zoned for Starkey Elementary. "We were under the impression that the whole zone was being bused," Lough said. According to district spokesman Ron Stone, 31 students in the neighborhood, which is bordered by Starkey Road to the west and Park Boulevard to the south, are zoned to Lakewood Elementary. Thirteen students received a special permission to remain at Starkey Elementary and 55 students were not reassigned. Lough said as soon as it was brought to her attention that there were still some elementary students who needed to cross 86th Avenue, she immediately remedied the situation. "Under circumstances like that, we don't do a study and say, "Oh, we have to wait and see,' " she said. Ms. Bush breathed a sigh of relief when Lough told her a guard would be at the intersection. But she said she wasn't told then how the mistake was made. "I was adamant that they had forgotten about our kids," she said. "We fell through the cracks." Around 12:30 p.m., determined to find the root of the problem, Ms. Bush drove to the school district's administration building in Largo. She never made it past the information desk. The guard sent her to the district's transportation building in Pinellas Park. "So I drove over there," she said, where a secretary told her administration, not transportation, was in charge of the district's crossing guards. A frustrated Ms. Bush returned home. Around 2 p.m. a television news reporter knocked on her door. One of her neighbors had called the station. The reporter interviewed her and the story appeared on the evening newscast. At 5 p.m., "Mary," a supervisor in the administration building called Ms. Bush. "She told me she didn't find an answer to the problem, but that she wasn't going to let it rest," Ms. Bush said. It must have been some sort of miscommunication, she was told. "The issue is solved," Ms. Bush said. "I just want to know how our kids could have been forgotten." For your informationIf you have a question or concern about a school crossing guard placement, call Sharon Lough, a supervisor for the school safety officer program, at 582-6475. For problems on the routes to school, such as broken sidewalks or tree branches hanging in the way, off-site safety forms are available in school offices.
 © 2006 • All Rights Reserved • St. Petersburg Times
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