Try Harder, Ventura

When parents at Ventura’s Citrus Glen elementary school decided to volunteer as crossing guards, they forgot to look both ways.

On the right: the safety of their children at a corner where the city won’t station a crossing guard.

On the left: government restrictions that prevent them from ensuring their children’s safety when the government itself does not.

Since the school’s opening in September 1999, a group of neighborhood parents has shepherded students across the street, rain or shine. They receive no pay. They’ve been praised by school administrators.

Nobody can say whether they’ve kept accidents from happening, but in a place as unfriendly to pedestrians as Ventura County, it’s tough to be unconcerned about the safety of children as they walk to school.

Just last month, a Buena High School freshman running for his school bus died after being struck by a car. That tragedy couldn’t have been prevented by a crossing guard, but incidents like it only confirmed Citrus Glen parents in their practice of donning Day-Glo orange vests, taking stop signs in hand and striding into a busy intersection.

Unfortunately, the police weren’t so taken with the parents’ can-do spirit.

No citations have been issued, but the parents have been warned that what they are doing is illegal. Without proper training, it seems, they cannot be authorized as crossing guards. Without the blessings of police and city officials, they are mere crossing vigilantes and must get out of the street. Otherwise they can be ticketed for loitering in a crosswalk.

It would seem a simple matter to give these eager volunteers the training they need to legally help children cross the street. Predictably, though, there’s a lot more to it. The intersection where students most need help--Darling Road at Jasper Avenue--has a stop sign on each corner. State guidelines prevent the posting of crossing guards at such intersections, according to Ventura officials.

On top of that, they warn, the situation could open the city to lawsuits if it doesn’t provide a new crop of volunteers as the old ones leave.

It all adds up to some sour lessons for students at Citrus Glen: Help your neighbor only at your risk. Trust the government to thwart good intentions in a web of needless regulation.

City officials say they are trying to come up with a way to make use of the parents without running afoul of state law. As “crossing assistants,” for instance, they would wield stop signs and dress like full-fledged crossing guards--but they’d have to work strictly from the sidewalk.

The city should try harder. Officials are right to demand that people wading into traffic be properly trained and regulated. But the band of volunteers is also right to insist on maximum safety at a school intersection.

Attaining it should be made as easy as crossing a street.