A sport utility vehicle blocks a crosswalk spanning Mesa Vista Avenue behind Tomiyasu Elementary School on Tuesday, while another vehicle ahead of it blocks a no-parking zone. Parents are among the least courteous drivers around schools, a Las Vegas police official said. Photo by Gary Thompson.

Gina Griesen didn't think she was being a nosy nag. She just wanted to make sure a grown-up wasn't keeping children from safely getting to and from school.

While Griesen was behind Tomiyasu Elementary School to pick up her fifth-grade daughter, Erika, earlier this month, she came across a sport utility vehicle parked in a crosswalk at Mesa Vista Avenue and Chica Way.

"I said, 'Sir, this is a crosswalk. He said, 'I'll only be two minutes,' " Griesen recalled last week. "I said, 'Sir, this is a crosswalk.' He said, 'Gotta go' and walked away. I can't believe what he said to me."

It's hardly a one-time occurrence at Tomiyasu and other schools valleywide, where some parents routinely park in all the wrong places, buzz past pedestrians or otherwise act like me-first jerks behind the wheel.

"They are absolutely the worst," Helen Lawhon, who manages crossing guards for Las Vegas police, said of some parent drivers. "All you care about is your child, and no one else around you.

"They know it's 15 mph. They know kids are walking. They just don't care. They just care about their individual child, making sure they get dropped off and get in the door, and then they take off like a bat out of hell," Lawhon said. "I don't know how someone hasn't gotten killed, walking between these cars. It's a bad situation."

And it's a situation that worries Griesen behind Tomiyasu, which at times looks more like McCarran International Airport's pickup area at the start of a holiday weekend than the quiet residential area.

"Every morning, there is a big SUV parked right on top of the crosswalk. I try to make my daughter use the crosswalk," Griesen said. "It's a crosswalk. My daughter should be able to cross on it. She's following the rules. The adults are breaking them."

She wasn't kidding. On a recent morning, a red pickup with Ohio plates came to a stop in the middle of the crosswalk outside Tomiyasu, right in the path of a child toting an impossibly big backpack who was crossing the street.

"There is no excuse for that," Griesen said. "How is that kid gonna cross?"

The child had to veer outside of the crosswalk.

"Technically, if that guy rolled forward and hit him, the kid wouldn't be in a crosswalk, right?" Griesen asked, illustrating a scenario in which the pedestrian could be blamed in an accident.

The pickup was one of at least four vehicles -- along with another pickup and two SUVs -- that blocked the crosswalk for at least two minutes in a half-hour span as students arrived at school that morning.

That, despite plenty of unoccupied curb only yards away -- but extra steps from a gate entrance.

"There's a whole sidewalk there," Griesen said. "How do they get driver's licenses?"

Parents are left to police themselves behind the school, where parents are asked to drop off older students. There is no crossing guard at that location, as police suffer a guard shortage and concentrate staff on higher-speed streets than Mesa Vista.

This past Tuesday morning, seven vehicles -- four SUVs, a pickup, a minivan and a car -- took turns blocking the crosswalk while another 20 vehicles at various times parked in the no-parking zone on either side of the crosswalk.

The latter is more than a ticky-tack violation. Cars that park too close to crosswalks end up blocking sightlines between drivers and walkers. When you're talking about monster SUVs and children, those sightlines are small to start with.

The situation isn't much better after school.

On a recent day, Griesen pointed out scores of vehicles, most of which were SUVs -- do you detect a pattern here? -- that were parked in the street, blocked other traffic or angle-parked into too-small parallel parking spots.

As through-traffic backed up from all the double-parking, a car crawled forward to get out of the crosswalk.

"That's the first person I've seen move for a person out of a crosswalk," Griesen said.

A second or two later, another car pulled into the vacated space atop the crosswalk, forcing a parent and two children to walk around it.

"There was a lady one time, parked her car in the middle of the street. The middle of the street. She was triple-parked," Griesen said. "I said, 'Lady, do you know you're parked in the middle of the street?' She said 'Oh, I didn't know where to go.'

"You could be from another country, you know not to park in the middle of the street," Griesen said.

So, what to do? Griesen would like to see schools and police crack down on parental driving by more closely monitoring drop-off and pickup zones.

Lawhon said most schools are good about encouraging parents to drive with caution. It's just those messages fall on deaf ears.

"They'll send out fliers and newsletters for children to take to their parents. Whether their parents read them, that's another story," Lawhon said.

Lawhon urges school officials to design or retrofit schools with vehicle loading zones in mind, and for parents to bring their brains to school along with their children.

"Your child is not the only one going to school. You must treat them all the same," Lawhon said. "Look out for them. Make way for them. So no one gets hurt."

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