Bellbrae PS active travel project

BELLBRAE Primary School is trialling a new start to the school day with its active travel project encouraging parents and students to minimise the school gate drop off.

Parents who drive their kids to school now have the option of parking at the nearby Bellbrae Reserve – where a coffee cart has conveniently popped up – and allow their children to complete the last 500m leg of the journey with other students on foot or bike.

It’s part of wider effort by parents and the school council to get more kids to ride, walk or catch the bus to school.

“It’s important for a number of reasons,” parent Emma Reynolds said, one of the driving forces behind the scheme.

“To build community, to build connection, there’s a myriad of mental health reasons that are good for the kids in in terms of getting them out in nature and getting them being active before they get to school, which can help them connect … just feel less anxious.”

It’s also alleviating the stresses of an early morning logjam at the school gate.

“Having parents drop their kids up here has just made such a difference to the congestion at the front of the school in the mornings,” Bellbrae Assistant Principal Louise Kahle said.

“Getting out of that car at the front of the school causes some anxiety for some kids. So having that release point up here, walking down the hill and just starting the day fresh is really big.”

With up to 90 per cent of Bellbrae Primary students living in Jan Juc, around five kilometres away, the push is on to get as many students as possible to gain the confidence to get to school by means other than car.

“If we can get even 10-20 per cent of those kids riding, it’s such an impact on the environment, their health, their wellbeing and just their mental attitude … we have some kids who even ride from Torquay,” Ms Kahle said.

“A big component of it is about just building or introducing some new habits, if we can introduce that from the ground up when they’re in prep or grade one, then they’re less likely when they’re in grade three or four to have the expectation that mum is going to drop us at the gate,” Ms Reynolds said.

“If we start giving the kids the skills to be able to walk by themselves to school, or ride by themselves to school, and we practice it as they get older then it also gives them the skills to be able to ride around the community and be independent in the community,” parent Shauna Burford said, who’s also been instrumental in putting the plan into practice.

“The shire has been very supportive of the initiative of having the coffee van and providing a permit and then also working with us to put in 40k zone,” Ms Reynolds said.

“We realised that one of the one of the barriers to riding school is people worried about the safety of their kids … so the shire came through and did a road safety audit for us and helped us with some funding,” Ms Burford said.

The next step is to permanently establish the people and infrastructure that will keep the scheme going, including the permanent funding of second crossing supervisor to oversee those coming in from Jan Juc and Torquay.

“We have a crossing supervisor down the bottom but not up here … the shire are going to be doing a traffic count in the coming weeks to see if they can fund that permanently,” Ms Kahle said.