At the corner of North Kainalu Drive in Kailua, dozens of students cross Kaha Street on weekday mornings to get to school before the first bell. Elsie Miyashiro, school traffic monitor, confidently oversees their safe arrivals.

With her fluorescent orange vest and white gloved hands, her authority is obvious. She wields a large stop sign, waving it in front of oncoming vehicles as she holds back a crowd of impatient students on the cusp of starting the weekend. Inattentive drivers receive her sharply blown whistle.

“People speeding, trying to cut corners — they’re all in a hurry to go somewhere,” Miyashiro said. “Sometimes people try to bypass me when I’m busy looking at the kids. I wish the drivers would go slowly for the kids’ sake.” 

Miyashiro, who is 75, said she earns about $18 an hour from the traffic division of the Honolulu Police Department. HPD hires her for two hours a day to handle Kainalu Elementary School’s petite pedestrians, a range of students from preschool to sixth grade. She’s one of 16 school traffic monitors on Oʻahu. 

She learned about the job as a grandmother to a sixth grader at Kainalu. Every day when she’d walk her grandson to school, she’d talk story with the friendly school crossing guard, who was on the verge of retirement. So she called the police department and inquired about taking over the job. By the time she took over as guardian of the intersection, her grandson had graduated to middle school.

Still, the job was an easy fit. Miyashiro lives only a five minute drive from the school. And in between her morning and afternoon crossing guard shifts, she helps teach a kindergarten class. At lunch, she hands out utensils and cleans up trays in the cafeteria.

The public school whose pupils she guards is five minutes from Marine Corps Base Hawai‘i. A third of the student body is the product of military families. The school itself opened in 1954 on land donated by Harold Kainalu Long Castle, after whom the school derives its name. In the Hawaiian language, Kainalu means “water” (kai) and “wave” (nalu). The school mascot is a dolphin.

A retired legal aid worker from Kailua, Miyashiro takes her retirement gig of more than a decade seriously. She owns her own set of orange traffic cones and begins each shift by standing them up along the intersection. The cones, she said, are a signal that there is a correct path to safely traverse the crossing.

Distracted drivers, she said, are the biggest threat to student safety. Asked if there has ever been a collision on her watch, she responded, “No! And I don’t know how I would live with myself if there were!”

But there have been close calls.

The job of school crossing guard comes with no enforcement powers, however. Miyashiro cannot write citations or make arrests. So when it comes to heavy-footed drivers, she tries to plead to their senses.

“Sometimes parents are in a rush to drop off at school or to pick up,” she said, “but I tell the parents to take it slow, take it easy. And I always have my whistle.”

One of the joys of the job is how many people Miyashiro gets to see each day. Students exchange high-fives with her as they cross the street. Drivers who regularly travel the intersection smile and wave.

Miyashiro said she hopes to usher students across the street as they go to and from school for as long as she has the strength to show up for work — in thunderstorms or pelting rain or under the punishing heat of the Hawaiian sun.

“Thank goodness we don’t have snow,” she said.