Students cross with broken bridge
Five months after its collapse, footbridge hasn’t been replaced
It has been five months since the students of Crescent Town Public School lost the footbridge that connects their school to most of their homes.
The bridge, which is owned by Pinedale Properties and the Toronto District School Board, partially collapsed in November 2018 and has still not been replaced.
After five months of scrambling down steep ramps or risking unsignalized road-crossings between the highrise neighbourhoods to the south and the school to the north, students, teachers and parents have had enough.
So, the Grade 3 class, headed by teacher Mariela Sirizzotti, wrote to Pinedale Properties’ CEO Alexander Grossman, the Toronto District School Board’s project supervisor for the area and Mayor John Tory, as an exercise in writing formal letters.
In one letter to Tory, signed by a student named Ehan, it said: “I am worried about how slippery it is for students to walk on the street to get to school. They might fall down and get hurt and get hit by a car. If we had the bridge, we wouldn’t be hit by cars.”
In another letter signed by a student named Sam, the writer quoted Tory’s tweet in November, which had promised to look into the inspections that had been done on the bridge prior to its collapse.
“So, Mr. Tory, what did you find out?” he wrote.
Three weeks after sending the letters, the class received nothing from Pinedale, an acknowledgement from Tory’s office and an update from the school board. The TDSB said it had agreed in principle to share costs proportionately with Pinedale and that there is a tender process ongoing and Pinedale has hired a consultant to do the design work.
Sirizzotti said that reassurance is cold comfort for the 18 children in her class.
“They say, ‘What if we had been walking on that bridge?’ They could have fallen, they could have gotten hurt, someone could have died,” Sirizzotti said.
Currently, students have few options for reaching the school from the highrise neighbourhood of Crescent Town. The best route is a steep ramp between buildings, owned by Pinedale, that crosses a narrow service road and leads directly through the school’s fenced-off kindergarten play area. Otherwise, students and their parents can make their way across a private roadway that winds underneath where the bridge once was.
“If there is a thought of not putting that bridge up, we need to find a safe way for kids to come to school from Crescent Town,” said Razia Rashed, a member of the school’s parent council. “Accessibility-wise, we need to think about them.”
According to principal Harpreet Ghuman, the school has been unsuccessful in its requests to obtain a crossing guard.
“We have worked with the city and we have worked with the police — according to them we don’t meet the requirements for having one,” Ghuman said.
Ghuman said that the path between home and school is so arduous for so many students that the office is changing its policy for issuing late slips.
“Is it really valuable giving children and families late slips when they’re trying to get there on time but their major access route is not there?”