By Adam Carey
The City of Yarra has removed a gate into Alphington Grammar, following through on its ultimatum that the school must let people walk or ride through its front entrance to public land near Darebin Creek.
The non-government school has resisted the council’s demand for several months, citing concerns about student safety and even voicing fears that paedophiles, drunks and drug-affected people would be able to enter the prep-12 school if the gate was removed.
Alphington Grammar School principal Dr Vivianne Nikou stands with students Miles, Isabella, Zoe, Ethan and Nikoletta at the school gates.Credit: Chris Hopkins
The school community rallied on Tuesday morning, hours before the council’s 5pm deadline, in a last-ditch effort to convince the council to back down. But the City of Yarra made good on its demand, removing the pedestrian gate on Tuesday night, in a move the school’s principal described as “lunacy”.
The school is in a pocket of residential Alphington that backs onto the Darebin Creek Trail, though there was no access to the trail through the school grounds.
The school’s front gate also runs across Old Heidelberg Road, a short dead-end street that is also a public road, but which the school fenced off from general traffic many years ago. A separate gate across the footpath was built more recently, cutting off pedestrian access through the school.
A City of Yarra spokesperson confirmed the council removed the pedestrian gate after the school ignored its final order to do it by 5pm on Tuesday. It has said it would seek to recover costs for the gate’s removal from the school.
A Yarra spokesperson said the school erected the gates illegally, and had been blocking community access to public land. She said it was disappointing the school did not comply with its legal requirement to remove the gate, “which was effectively privatising public land”.
“With the removal of the gate, the community is now able to access public land on weekends and on public holidays as is their legal right,” Wade said.
“Many schools across Melbourne have campuses that cross public land and they have come up with solutions to address this that do not involve blocking access to public land.”
Alphington Grammar School principal Dr Vivianne Nikou said on Wednesday that the school’s security footage showed two people removing the gate about 6.45pm the previous night, in a job that took about two minutes.
The school stuck a temporary gate across the footpath, but Nikou said people were taking their opportunity to walk their dogs through the removed gate early and towards the creek on Wednesday morning.
“Some of the local residents are deliberately being provocative by walking through and saying, we are entitled to be here, right in the middle of kids arriving,” Nikou said.
By the afternoon, a member of the public had removed the temporary gates with an angle grinder, in broad daylight. Nikou said the school was considering its legal options.
Alphington and Fairfield Civic Association president Todd Perry said residents of the southern part of Alphington just wanted access to open space along the creek.
“It was really drilled home with lockdowns over the last two years that open space is very important for us.”
During public consultations, the school submitted to the council its concerns that reinstating public access to Old Heidelberg Road “is inconsistent with mandatory child safe standards”.
“It is incredibly traumatic for young children to be confronted by strangers when they should feel safe within their own schoolgrounds, and this has occurred several times within recent years,” it said.
“Teachers on yard duty and overseeing outdoor sporting activities regularly need to discourage clearly undesirable persons who are loitering for the purposes of wanting to photograph students.”
VicRoads has also investigated building a new link to the Darebin Creek Trail via Old Heidelberg Road, but rejected the idea due to concerns about student safety, environmental impact and high cost. Instead, it is building a $9.1 million path a short distance south of the school, which will connect the trail to Farm Road.
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