An 80-year old woman who worked as a school crossing guard in New Jersey with a “smile on her face and care in her soul” was struck by a car and killed this week while escorting children across the street, officials said.
The woman was hit at an intersection in Woodland Park, a borough in northeastern New Jersey, at 3:35 p.m. on Monday, the Passaic County Prosecutor’s Office said. The Woodland Park School District said the woman, Jean Schultz, was helping two siblings, one of them a student in its district, cross the intersection. The children were also injured but were in stable condition, the prosecutor’s office said.
Ms. Schultz was a “longtime, dedicated crossing guard,” the district said, adding: “She has served this community always with a smile on her face and care in her soul.”
Ms. Schultz was pronounced dead at Saint Joseph’s University Medical Center, the prosecutor’s statement said. The children were also transported to the hospital, while the driver of the vehicle remained at the scene, it said.
It did not say whether any charges had been filed, but the authorities were investigating, the statement said.
“Jean was a kind and gentle soul who lit up every time she saw the kids coming, greeting them with a smile and ensuring their safety each and every day,” Mayor Tracy Kallert of Woodland Park said in a statement on Tuesday.
The death highlighted the dangers for crossing guards in the United States. In November, an investigation by The Associated Press and WSOC-TV found that over the past 10 years, at least 230 school crossing guards across 37 states and Washington, D.C., had been struck by vehicles on the job, three dozen of them fatally.
The school district said Ms. Schultz was hired by the police department in Woodland Park, a borough in Passaic County with about 13,400 residents. The Woodland Park Police Department referred calls to the prosecutors’ office on Wednesday.
WABC-TV News reported that the children were injured when they fell after Ms. Schultz pushed them away from the car that struck her.
The intersection where the incident happened, at McBride Avenue and Lackawanna Avenue, is a busy one, surrounded by a neighborhood of banks and an Amazon warehouse, as well as detours associated with work on Interstate 80. Crossing guards at that intersection commonly escort students from Memorial Middle School and Beatrice Gilmore Elementary School.
Several of Ms. Schultz’s family members could not be reached on Wednesday. An online obituary said her husband, Richard Schultz, died on May 12, 2021.
Ms. Schultz had been working as a crossing guard in Woodland Park since 2022. In New Jersey, there are about 6,900 school crossing guards, according to the New Jersey Safe Routes Resource Center, which trains the guards with funding from state agencies.
Municipalities choose where to post school guards based on school bus resources, the numbers of students who walk and other factors, the resource center said. Guards are paid from $7.25 to $20 an hour, it says.
On social media, crossing guards around the country responded to the news with anecdotes of their own close calls and their fears about working in busy streets with little more than a safety vest and a hand-held stop sign.
On the Facebook page for the National Association for Crossing Guards, an online public square where crossing guards commiserate over cold weather and unruly drivers, Ms. Schultz was mourned in the comments below a news report of her death.
“From not stopping at stop signs (including my handheld sign), blocking or stopping too close to crosswalks, to running red lights, the driving behavior and actions I witness are appalling and scary,” said one writer.
In New Jersey, 16 crossing guards were killed by vehicles from 1993 to 2016, while 231 guards were injured seriously enough that they were absent from work, according to state statistics.
Christine Hauser is a Times reporter who writes breaking news and features.
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