The City of Los Angeles is launching a long-awaited crossing guard expansion program aimed at improving safety for students walking and biking to school. But buried in the details of this bureaucratic rollout is something potentially transformative: schools may now be allowed to coordinate their own volunteer crossing guards, if city departments make good on that promise.

According to LAist, the LA Department of Transportation (LADOT) has hired 80 new paid guards and plans to add 200 more over the next two years, prioritizing elementary and middle schools with the highest crash rates and fewest existing protections. The urgency is real. Nearly 500 children were hit by cars near schools in LA in just five years. Still, with more than 1,000 schools on LADOT’s safety priority list and only a fraction getting immediate infrastructure or personnel upgrades, families across the city are left wondering how soon help will arrive.

This is where volunteer guards could come in. LADOT’s interdepartmental report on school safety, released in late 2024, includes a ranked list of 1,164 school sites based on need. For fiscal year 2025–2026, only 30 schools will receive new speed humps or speed tables. Many of the schools highest on the list are under-resourced campuses in lower-income neighborhoods, disproportionately serving Black, brown, and immigrant students. Meanwhile, schools in wealthier neighborhoods with well-connected PTAs and abundant parental involvement are largely absent from the list. And yet they may end up being the first to benefit.

Why? Because those schools are the most likely to have parents with the time, language fluency, legal savvy, and institutional support to organize volunteer crossing guards as soon as the city opens that door. If LADOT and the City Attorney create a pathway for schools to manage their own vetted volunteers, it will likely be the higher-resourced schools that jump on the opportunity. In the absence of clear guidance, training, and multilingual outreach, lower-income school communities could once again be left behind, this time in the name of empowerment.

Historically, the city discouraged volunteer crossing guards due to liability concerns. But LADOT now plans to partner with the City Attorney’s office to build a legal and administrative framework that allows school sites to coordinate their own safety volunteers. While this has the potential to be transformative, success will depend on how accessible the process is made to communities across the city. Will the city provide user-friendly, translated templates for liability waivers? Will there be community-based trainings, especially for immigrant parents or Title I schools? Or will this be yet another system that rewards privilege under the guise of flexibility?

Volunteer crossing guards should not be a workaround for schools that have been denied safety investments for decades. They should be a tool until city-funded safety improvements arrive. Without clear equity guardrails, the policy risks recreating the very disparities it’s meant to solve. Los Angeles families are doing everything they can to keep their kids safe. It’s time for the city to do the same, and ensure that every school, not just the ones with the loudest voices or deepest pockets, can participate fully in this new program.