Problems keeping Safe Passage workers?

Provided by City of Chicago

Half the Safe Passage workers along a Roseland route apparently quit during the first week of school, CBS-2 is reporting. And another vendor may have left the corner of 119th and State — along the way to Curtis Elementary School — unmanned Tuesday morning, according to CBS.

David Weatherall, a safe passage supervisor for American Enterprise, the vendor responsible for that route in Roseland, told CBS there’s no assigned worker at that corner but floaters cover the area.

Roseland Ceasefire lost half its staff in the first week, with 13 of 26 workers quitting after the first day, according to its executive director. Bob Jackson is not in the office Wednesday; a colleague said he was the only one authorized to talk to the press and gave a CPS phone number for more details.

But Jackson told CBS-2: “Last week was a very hot week,” he said. “A lot of people have health issues and were not ready to be out in the sun.”

“Some called a half hour before the shift started, some just didn’t return.”

Hired to watch 53 routes to elementary schools getting kids from closed schools, the workers earn $10 an hour for about five hours a day, split between morning and afternoon, according to CPS.

Dwayne Truss, assistant director of the Raise Your Hand parent group, told WBEZ that those terms are “setting it up to be high-turnover.”

The 600 new hires watching elementary school routes join another 635 employed to guard mostly high school routes.

The 119th and State corner was always covered, and vendors have extra workers in place for when folks call out or move on, CPS told the Sun-Times Wednesday.