Rosa Raffington’s official title is crossing guard for Laurel School, but she looks out for everyone who passes her corner on Ringwood Avenue, whether that’s neighbors, elementary students, or M-A students on their way to class. To them, she’s Ms. Rosa.
Even though her morning shift ends at 8:15, she stays 15 minutes later to wish M-A students running late a good morning.
“It’s not actually like a job,” she said. “It’s just fun watching the kids, people of all ages going by, and I actually look forward to seeing students.”
Ms. Rosa’s mornings are full of small acts of kindness, like a cheerful good morning or a card. She believes, eventually, those good deeds come back around. “You don’t know where your blessing is coming from,” she said.
Most of them start with a greeting. She knows some mornings nobody feels like getting out of bed, let alone going to school. She hopes to brighten up their mornings.
“Just coming out and seeing someone saying, ‘Good morning, have a wonderful day,’” she said. “Maybe [it] makes somebody else feel better and gives them a little encouragement to move forward.”
She also makes sure to learn people’s names. “I try to know their names, ask their names, so it’s more personal than just seeing [them] every morning, seeing them go by or coming and just say[ing] ‘Hi, bye,’” she said.
Sometimes students include Ms. Rosa in their own school traditions. One year, she photographed three friends who walked to school together every day and, at the end of the year, gave them each a copy so they would have a physical memory of their morning routine. “People, they grow up and they go their separate ways,” she said. “Maybe they’re saying, you know, I had a buddy, so and so, and trying to figure out what they look like again […] So I say you should have a picture.”
Ms. Rosa also wants the students she sees to have a bright future. “I’m always telling kids, step up or pull up your pants or something,” she said. “Don’t just be kind of slouchy, like dragging along. Make sure you get to your class on time.” She often asks seniors walking by about their postgraduate plans and reminds them to take school seriously.
Her kindness doesn’t stop at the corner. Ms. Rosa offers to plant flowers in people’s yards, water them, create a vegetable garden, or work on any gardening-related projects. “I think that wherever there are children, there should be flowers,” she said.
Ms. Rosa believes her habit of greeting everyone may stem from where she grew up: a small country district in Jamaica, far from any city. There were no streetlights and hardly any cars, but neighbors looked out for each other.
“Somebody could actually call your name just walking in the dark,” she said. “That’s the kind of community I lived in.”
There, even if people had already greeted each other and said good morning, it was normal to say it again later in the day. She also thinks that being the oldest of five children may have something to do with her dedication to looking out for others. “I think I’m everybody’s mother and everybody’s grandmother,” she said.
Today, her siblings and her son all live in Southern California, but she has found family closer to home. “The school staff here is basically like family,” she said.
In Jamaica, free education lasted until age 15, and Ms. Rosa’s ended without warning. Every morning, the headmaster called roll, but one day, she didn’t hear her name. When she asked why, she was told that she had finished her eight years. “That was like the worst day of my life,” she said.
As the oldest, she didn’t have a chance at the after-school classes and scholarship exams that sent some children on to private schools. Instead, she went to work.
In 1967, at age 27, she followed her mother to California. She started as a domestic worker for a family in Woodside, then spent 16 years as a nursing assistant at Stanford. She also looked after elderly people and children while their families traveled.
In California, she was able to continue her education. Despite setbacks in early schooling, she earned an associate degree in psychology from Cañada College and a bachelor’s degree in social work from San Jose State University.
To Ms. Rosa, everything in life has a positive side, even when it doesn’t seem that way. “In everything there is some good,” she said.
At her corner, kindness always comes back. “It’s really interesting that people actually take notice,” she said. One morning, a woman came running down the street toward Ms. Rosa’s corner. The woman explained that she had come to thank Ms. Rosa because her children had told her Ms. Rosa is why they get out of bed in the morning.
For years, a little girl smiled and waved at Ms. Rosa every morning as her family’s SUV turned at the corner. Just before summer break one year, the car stopped, and the girl handed her a card. She wrote that seeing Ms. Rosa in the mornings made her day, and that she was switching schools for sixth grade. “I didn’t even know she knew my name,” Ms. Rosa said. That evening, Ms. Rosa wrote a card back and handed it to the girl the next morning. “So that was extremely nice,” she said. “I always wondered where she is in school right now.”
A woman named Dorothy once walked up to Ms. Rosa’s corner, handed her a card, and told her there should be more people like her. Ms. Rosa wrote her a letter back, and a few days later she found a basket from Dorothy on the porch with fruits and a rose plant. “[Our friendship] is just really a really wonderful experience for me,” Ms. Rosa said.
“This was an unexpected experience, and it’s nice to know that people care,” Ms. Rosa said. “People are always watching. You really never know who’s watching, so you always have to be on your best behavior.”
“The kindness that you do for someone somewhere, somebody will end up maybe doing it for you,” she said. “Sometimes you feel like you’re all alone, but really you’re not, because there’s always someone out there who cares.”
