

Chris Fox, CP24.com





You won’t see any uniformed police officers filling in as crossing guards this school year.

As part of the ongoing efforts to modernize the Toronto Police Service, uniformed officers will no longer be required to fill in for absent school crossing guards.

Instead, a contract has been signed between the city and Neptune Security Services that will see the private company responsible for backfilling services whenever a school crossing guard is unable to attend work.

Police say that the replacement crossing guards will “undergo the same screening processes and will be provided the same training as current TPS School Crossing Guards.”

They say that the replacement crossing guards will also be easily identified, as they will be outfitted with a vest that contains a Neptune Security Services logo on the left chest and the words "Crossing Guard" at the back.

“I am confident that with the training we are going to offer and the pool of people that we are going to have available to fill in when the regular crossing guards may not be able to come to work that children will be every bit as well protected as they always were,” Mayor John Tory told reporters at an unrelated press conference on Tuesday morning. “This will be better for the police service, good for children and families and it will just be a sensible arrangement.”

The Toronto Police Service will continue to manage the administration of the school crossing guard program for now but that responsibility will be officially handed over to the city’s transportation services department in September 2019.

The change is one of 32 that is being made to the operations of the Toronto Police Service over the next three years as part of a comprehensive modernization plan approved in February 2017.

Some of the others including the merging of some police divisions and the use of civilian employees for some non-emergency neighbourhood safety incidents.

Tory said the idea of the change with crossing guards is to “remove some of the burdens that police officers had, to allow them to devote more of their time to police work in the sort of purest sense.”