The carline coverage playbook

Staff to the choke points, not the curb length

Map where cars stop, where children cross, and where the queue spills onto public road. Those three are your posts. A 200-foot curb with one crossing point needs fewer adults than a 90-foot curb with two crossings and a shared parking entrance.

Baseline ratios that hold up

• One adult per loading zone segment of roughly 6 to 8 vehicles.
• One dedicated adult per crossing point — never shared with a loading segment.
• One floater with a radio who is not assigned to a fixed post.
• One indoor holding-area supervisor for early arrivals and late pickups.

Write the rain plan before it rains

Inclement weather changes the post map, not just the mood. Decide in advance which posts move indoors, which get an extra body, and who makes the call by what time. Then attach that plan to the duty itself as a note so the person standing there at 7:20 can read it on their phone.

The same-day coverage protocol

1. 1Teacher marks the duty as needing coverage the moment they know — the night before counts.
2. 2Every eligible colleague is notified once, with the post, time, and location.
3. 3First to claim owns it; the calendar and the front office view update immediately.
4. 4If a carline post is still open 60 minutes before start, it escalates to admins by name.
5. 5Anything still unfilled at start time triggers the floater and gets logged for review.

The escalation step is what separates a working protocol from a hopeful one. Set the threshold tighter for carline than for lunch or hallway duty — there is no grace period when cars are already queued.

Review monthly, not annually

Pull the coverage report once a month: which posts went unfilled, which teachers requested coverage most, and which claimed most. Two months of that data usually reveals one structurally understaffed post that everyone had been absorbing by improvisation.