Fairfax County officials are exploring privatizing the police department’s school crossing guard program as a potential solution to address staffing challenges and reduce the burden on officers.
The Fairfax County Police Department has struggled to meet the demand for crossing guards in recent years, leading sworn police officers to step in and provide additional support, Assistant Police Chief Bob Blakley told the Board of Supervisors at a Safety and Security Committee meeting yesterday (Tuesday).
After dropping its coverage of crossings in Herndon and Fort Belvoir and considering similar changes in the Town of Vienna, the FCPD has recommended that the county consider outsourcing the entire program to a private vendor to improve efficiency and free up police resources.
“We believe that we should consider privatizing the crossing guard program entirely so that someone’s paying full time and attention to it and is 100% focused on this issue and not trying to balance mission demands,” Blakley said.
According to Blakley, there are currently 164 crossing locations in need of guards countywide. At the moment, his department employs 52 crossing guards who serve 240 of the 328 crossings each day between 6 a.m. and 6 p.m., averaging 4.6 crossings per guard.
The FCPD is working to hire 10 more dedicated crossing guards. However, Blakley noted that even with these new hires, it would still be insufficient to cover all 328 crossings, some of which are currently being handled by other sworn officers.
“When we start talking about how many [crosswalks] we’re covering, about half of the police officers are during those morning and afternoon times out of service and unavailable,” Blakley said.
Blakley says part of the problem is that crossing guards are hired on a district level, rather than through a centralized, countywide process, making it challenging to recruit and retain crossing guards across the county’s various police districts.
“We have tried a central FCPD crossing guard announcement, and a guard from the Mount Vernon District is probably not gonna want to drive to Chantilly for a 30-minute school crossing,” he said.
The FCPD also only has the budget to hire 62 crossing guards, costing the county about $2 million annually, which is still insufficient to cover all crossing locations. The county spends another $1.5 million in overtime pay for sworn officers to cover the remaining crosswalks.
“So, even if we were at full capacity, they would probably be unable to cover all of the crossings,” Blakley said.
To address these challenges, officials are exploring privatizing the crossing guard program. Blakley admitted the FCPD still needs to collect more data on how the program would work and its costs, but his initial estimate ranged from $700,000 to $1 million annually — about the same as hiring an additional 20 crossing guards for the current program.
“If the FCPD kept the program in its current state, certainly trying to add more crossing guard positions and boosting that program up…we could probably strike a little bit more of a balance, but I think that would continue some of the challenges we face,” he said.
If the county sticks with the current program, Blakley recommended hiring more crossing guards or adjusting the crossing criteria to “eliminate excessive crossings” at most middle and high schools.
“We found that most counties and cities don’t provide school crossings for high schools, and many, if not most middle schools, which again, points us back to our criteria to take a look and see if we’re out of alignment,” he said.
For comparison, Miami, Florida, has 329,458 students compared to the approximately 183,000 students in Fairfax County Public Schools, but it only has 40 crossings for its 540 schools. Miami contracted a private company that covers the crossings without assistance from local police.
While supervisors seemed open to privatizing the crossing guard program, several expressed caution about moving forward too quickly. They emphasized the need for FCPD to gather more data on how a privatized program would operate and its potential costs.
“If we went the privatization route, I think all of us could come up with 100 questions here, everything from liability to uniform training,” Board of Supervisors Chairman Jeff McKay said. “All the things we could think of here, we need to hash those out and what would look more like a proposal — not saying, ‘Hey schools, this is what we’re doing,’ but let’s go to the school system with our principled solution to this problem.”
Braddock District Supervisor James Walkinshaw suggested the county look into creating a “community safety officer” role that could handle crossing guard duties and other low-level tasks, freeing up sworn police officers for more critical work.
“I would like us to use this as an opportunity to at least start an exploration. Do we have the authority under the Code of Virginia to establish another job category of folks in in the police department who could be a host of things kind of a Swiss Army knife role to take some of the burden off of our sworn police officers so they can do the important work we want them to be doing?” he said.
Though the board didn’t establish a clear timeline for Blakley to return with more data, McKay mentioned that County Manager Bryan Hill would follow up with FCPS Superintendent Michelle Reid to discuss the issue further.
