Taking it to the streets

By Melissa Grant
KOOWEERUP Primary School staff have taken to standing in the middle of Station Street to provide a safe crossing point for students.
Getting from one side of the road to the other has become a nightmare with trucks rumbling through the centre of town at a rate of more than one a minute.
School principal David Payne this week joined the chorus calling for a Kooweerup Bypass, saying children’s safety hung in the balance.
“We have children as young as five crossing the road,” he said.
“We walk the children to the pool twice a week and students have to cross over Station Street and it’s quite a difficult task at the moment.”
Mr Payne said the safest way was for a teacher to stand in the centre of the road to literally stop the traffic.
He said most families travelling to the school, located on Moody Street, were also faced with a dangerous situation on a daily basis.
“The T-intersection is dangerous,” he said. “The vision to the left coming out of Station Street (onto Rossiter Road) is dangerous as is the right hand turn into Rossiter Road from Station Street.”
Kooweerup Secondary College said the safety of staff and students was paramount.
Acting-principal Peter Handley said: “If the bypass supports this then that’s a great thing”.
But he said the state of disrepair of Kooweerup-Pakenham Road also needed to be addressed.
Mr Payne agreed.
“I drive to work along that road each morning … very rarely do I not have a truck travelling in front of me or behind me,” he said.
“The township is growing, the amount of traffic using the township is growing, but nothing is being done to improve local roads.”
VicRoads has come up with two proposed routes for a bypass of Kooweerup, but no government funding has been committed to the project.
A petition is circulating in Kooweerup calling on the State Government to commit to its construction.