Guardian Angel Jeanette Alberty Is Part Crossing Guard, Part Tutor And Part Godmotherly Source Of Comfort For The Children At Audubon Elementary School

The average vehicle barreling down Northwest Boulevard weighs 3,300 pounds. The average grade school student, 80.

Jeanette Alberty is all that stands between them - and she isn’t moving.

“Shriek,” goes the whistle, flip goes the wrist and 77 talking, daydreaming, bumping children safely cross the street.

Twenty frigid minutes creep by. Alberty flips off the caution light, collects the orange cones and heads into Audubon Elementary.

For the rest of the day, she covers the jobs nobody would kill for: tutoring a struggling child, chaperoning a field trip, playground duty. She’s paid for 3.5 hours a day. She works eight.

“Mrs. Alberty contributes countless hours to the kids at Audubon, she volunteers so much of her time,” says principal Greg Baerlocher. “We have so many people who work here and there without the benefits of being full-time. Without their support, we’d be falling behind.”

Teachers turn to Alberty expectantly when they need an extra hand. Kids freeze on the playground after a single blast of her whistle.

“The whistle is the power of the schoolyard,” she says of the shiny bulb hanging from her neck. “It’s part of my jewelry.”

They call her the “Audubon Oprah,” and though Alberty would die blushing to hear it, she does talk all day, albeit quietly and to children. She picks up bad moods, anger and hurt feelings like police radar.

A new kid stands awkwardly at the edge of a touch football game. Alberty senses his loneliness and asks about his old home. He beams, launching into every address he’s ever had.

When two boys start swinging on the grass, she separates them, speaking softly. A few minutes later, they’re arm-in-arm. Little girls follow her so close they bump into her when she pauses. Cars start honking when they spot her a block away.

“This is considered a thankless job, but it is a thankful job. I get to have rapport with all these kids,” she says with a smile.

“She makes a difference here, definitely,” says Pearl Cooper, a long-time employee who runs the school’s breakfast program. “She makes it a lot more fun and relaxed.”

Alberty’s career wasn’t chosen. It snuck up on her until one morning she realized she’d been at the Northwest Boulevard crosswalk every day for 12 years and there isn’t a child or car that she didn’t recognize.

“She knows the families, the situations, the kids,” Baerlocher said.

“I didn’t ever want to be inside, I wanted to be outside, I like this job a lot,” she says.

It’s a far cry from the woman once so shy she could barely communicate.

Alberty was a newly separated mother of three boys when she started working at Audubon as her youngest son entered first grade. A speech impediment and a failed marriage to a man she met while studying education at Eastern Washington University left her with little confidence.

The job and the co-workers who came with it helped her rebuild.

“We kept teasing her until she had to laugh, cry or leave,” says Cooper.

Now Alberty’s youngest son Issac is a senior at North Central and she can’t envision leaving.

“Even if I’m home sick, I can’t rest until the 3 o’clock bell rings because I don’t want anything to happen,” she says. “Safety is on my mind all the time. I’m always watching children.”

There hasn’t been an accident at the Northwest Boulevard crosswalk since she started. She coordinates teams of fifth- and sixth-graders who also serve on safety patrol at other points around the school. They take it seriously because she does.

“It teaches good citizenship, responsibility, accountability - I try to give all the students a chance.”

“It’s fun,” said Joe Davis, 12. “We get to yell at kids for walking too slow or cars for driving too fast.”

An active Jehovah’s Witness, Alberty attends the Northwest Kingdom Hall and treats herself with old black-and-white movies, romances. Make that comedies, she admits.

On the playground, the radio Alberty carries tends to broadcast orders from the drive-up window at Kentucky Fried Chicken more than real emergencies, but she is always watchful. She’s held too many broken arms and bleeding heads not to be.

She stepped away from playground duty only once, for a week, after her good friend, principal Dick Stannard, died this fall. Being out there without him was too bleak. Even so, she was still out on the crosswalk at Northwest Boulevard.

She remembers when her own mother died in Illinois and the Audubon staff helped send her back for the services. She wears her mother’s Russian-style hat on cold days and practices her mother’s wisdom: that children need love, that small differences are best treated in small ways, that the quiet daughter can sometimes speak the loudest.

“Mrs. Alberty, we made a worm house,” yell fourth-graders crouched in the sand. In the bitter wind, the worm house, a discarded cigarette pack, and the worm blow away. The kids, busy talking to Mrs. Alberty, don’t notice.

The Audubon Oprah would like to meet the real Oprah Winfrey, whom she considers a role model. Co-workers made a video to send the television host but haven’t heard back.

“I would like to invite you to my home,” Alberty says on tape. “But mostly I would like you to meet my family at Audubon.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: 2 Photos (1 Color)