How The Other Half Thinks
By Mitch Berg
This article about the battle against speeding in st. Paul and other cities.
Concerned about speeding motorists on St. Paul’s Raymond Avenue, members of a St. Anthony Park neighborhood task force …were putting the final touches on the request [for help with curbing speeding] when they got word that a woman and her two children had been hit by a car while crossing Raymond near an elementary school.
The accident…sent the woman to the hospital.
Sounds dangerous. And near a school, no less!
So what’s the official response from the school itself – and the principal, who’s charged with seeing to her students’ safety?
Andrea Dahms, the principal at St. Anthony Park Elementary, so mistrusted drivers on that stretch that two years ago she removed the school’s student crossing guard at Raymond and Gordon Avenues. That’s the same intersection where the woman and her children were recently injured.
That’s right – stop warning people on the dangerous street to watch for kids, because it’s too dangerous?
And these are the people that are educating the kids?
February 6th, 2007 at 3:20 pm
Principal Dahms removed the student crossing guard because it wasn’t safe. Cars weren’t heeding the posted speed limits or paying attention to the crossing guards directions. She put is a request for a professional ADULT posted but was told there wasn’t money in the public safety budget for that to happen.
By the way, there is nothing from stopping an adult volunteer from serving as a crossing guard.
Rather than bitching and complaining about everything the schools are lacking in, I’d love to see the parents get off their asses for a change and contribute.