The Cupertino Courier

Cover Story

Photograph by Brian Connelly

Marilyn Howard has been the crossing guard for Eaton Elementary School for 26 years.

On Guard

For 26 years, Marilyn Howard has helped youngsters get safely to the other side

By HUGH BIGGAR

There is a multicultural parade of sorts taking place at the corner of Blaney Avenue and Clifford Drive just after 2 in the afternoon.

Here, a seemingly quiet suburban corner hums with the sounds of children and adults streaming out of nearby Eaton Elementary School.

Sedans and tinted-window SUVS loaded with children roll by.

Students bike down Clifford sporting pastel-colored Pikachu-style backpacks.

A mother walks her daughter home from school and converses with her in Mandarin.

An Indian grandmother in a sari and sandals pushes a stroller.

Supervising it all with a patient, knowing eye--and a whistle--is Marilyn Howard.

For five years, Howard, 74, has worked as a crossing guard at this corner.

Before that she worked as a crossing guard along Stevens Creek Boulevard, another chapter in her 26-year crossing guard career with the Cupertino Union School District. Along the way, she has had a view from the front lines of changes in the community and the schools, and become an institution in her own right.

"We are lucky to have her," Eaton School parent Shama Nair said. "She has been great about keeping an eye on the kids and comes to all the events at Eaton."

For Howard, such dedication is just part of a day's work--a shift that typically runs, rain or shine, from 8 to 9:15 in the morning and from 2 to 4 in the afternoon.

"I am a creature of habit," she says simply of her long crossing guard service. "After I got to 20 years, I said, "Let's see if I can make it to 25." Now, her goal is stretching that tenure to 30 years.

Howard, who first moved to Cupertino with her husband in the late 1950s, began as a crossing guard in 1980 after her children had grown up and moved away. (Her son Russ recently retired from a long career as a Sunnyvale public safety officer.) Looking for a way to stay busy, Howard initially considered taking an exercise class, but the school district came calling instead.

She hasn't looked back while looking both ways as she crosses the street, despite low pay ("I haven't had a raise since about 2001," she says) and the outsourcing of her job from the city of Cupertino to a private company.

"The interaction with parents and kids is rewarding and good for me," Howard says, adding she also likes the exercise of constantly crossing the street. She estimates some days she can walk up to 2 miles.

Her work quickly shows Howard is more than an authority figure in a yellow and orange striped vest, sunglasses and hand-held red stop sign.

On a slightly cloudy day in late April, for instance, Howard whistles traffic to a halt while also working hard to engage and watch over her charges.

She tells a group of boys to stop throwing flower blossoms at each other. She insists that a young Indian boy on a bike return to school to get his helmet.

Howard also tries to learn the names of as many students as she can, a task that has gotten more difficult in recent years.

"There are a lot of children I don't see because they are driven to school. It used to be children walked to school with their friends," she says, standing on the corner of Blaney waiting for more students to come by. "And children don't play much outside much anymore," she adds, and, indeed, for Howard's entire afternoon shift, there is something eerily missing in the ambient noise.

On this flower-scented afternoon in a safe and clean suburban neighborhood of single-family ranch houses, cars brake to squeaky stops, birds chatter, but sounds of children running, shouting or laughing are entirely missing.

Children's shifting leisure habits are not the only changes Howard has witnessed in a neighborhood she has also lived in for more than 40 years.

Howard points out, for instance, that the west side of Blaney was orchards and farmhouses when she and her husband first moved into what was then a new subdivision.

Most of her old neighbors have since moved away, and Howard describes herself as one of the few "originals" left.

"There has been a big turnover in the neighborhood, and an influx of Indians and East Asians," she says, as well as Russians, Israelis and a few Africans. Raised in Oakland, Howard finds such diversity familiar and welcomes it.

"With the influx, there have been far less discipline problems," she adds. "The children are well behaved and often accompanied by a parent or grandparent."

She also says the elementary schools' elimination of sixth grade, which was moved to middle schools, has helped tremendously with discipline problems.

"[Sixth grade] is the age it gets into the boy/girl thing, and it makes a big difference [in behavior]," she says.

And along with the students' improving manners, Howard has also learned to be extra careful.

"It's the case now that we're told not to touch children in any way and to never take them in our car," she says. "Times have changed." Back when Howard first started as a crossing guard, the only requirement for the job consisted of getting a chest X-ray.

She has since improvised some survival skills of her own.

"You have to bring everything you need," Howard says. "There is no place to get anything or time for breaks, so you have to bring coffee and newspapers. We're allowed to keep a chair and read the paper, but we're not supposed to bring a radio."

Howard has also learned to cultivate relationships with residents of nearby homes so she can stand under eaves during downpours.

Howard has a safety principle of her own she tries to impart to children: "A good safety regulation is children should not be with anybody they don't know about," Howard says.

It's a rule she is sure to enforce, along with ensuring those she comes across in her little intersection of the world make it to the other side--whatever that other side may be--safely.