IT has taken two years and a lot of fierce lobbying to achieve a minor breakthrough - and even now Cate Hall can't help but feel slightly suspicious.
As the face of the parent lobby group High School for Coburg (HSC), Ms Hall has been at the forefront of the community push for a new state secondary school in the area.
Through most of its campaign, the 1500-strong group has met a less-than-enthusiastic response - even resistance -from Spring Street. Then last week Education Minister Bronwyn Pike announced that a taskforce would investigate their demands.
 The taskforce will look at the current and projected numbers of secondary school-aged children in and around Coburg, with a report expected about the middle of the year.
While it is the first sign of hope, Ms Hall feels the development is bitter-sweet, especially since she found out about the taskforce through the media.
"We must focus on the positive because we have come from a position where we were told there was no way that the minister would do this and we have turned that around," she says. "One could ask why it has taken so long, that tempers our optimism . . . and in this post-Madden memo, pre-election times one should have a healthy degree of cynicism."
Not far away, in Yarraville, another parent lobby group is fighting a similar battle. For five years, SKY High has waged a loud, aggressive and politically attuned campaign to persuade the government that its area also deserves a new secondary school. More than 1000 parents in Seddon, Kingsville and Yarraville are backing SKY's push.
Both campaigns have been textbook examples of citizen activism. The areas also have much in common: traditional working-class suburbs that have undergone a social transformation as aspirational, young middle-class families moved in. Both have experienced a baby boom, and both face the extremes of the education spectrum: lots of state primary schools to choose from, but what they say is a near-barren secondary landscape.
It is not a situation they are taking lightly. They have been dogged in pursuit of their aim - lobbying government, crunching numbers and building bridges to the media.
Both groups have found inspiration in the history of another inner-suburban school, Fitzroy High, which was closed as part of the Kennett government's cuts to the school system. The locals agitated. In 2004, 12 years after it closed, Fitzroy reopened.
Cate Hall formed HSC with another mother, Morena Milani. They had already campaigned successfully to have the Coburg Olympic pool reopened after it was closed by the local council in 2006. They discovered their children's education opportunities were limited and realised their next battle would be for a secondary school.
Like many parents in the area, Ms Hall struggled to get her daughter Erin, now five, into a kindergarten programme. With 22 state and Catholic primary schools in the vicinity, she was shocked when she looked at the limited secondary options.
"I just suddenly realised that there was no high school in this large area . . . it's not like there is a choice, there is just no option," she says.
She says 17 secondary schools have either closed or merged in the region from West Preston to Brunswick since 1992 - some victims of Kennett-era cuts - leaving a hole in the school network.
The review announced by the minister comes six years after another local school, Moreland City College, was forced to close amid a wave of bad publicity over student vandalism, VCE security and shrinking enrolments. It later re-opened as Coburg Senior High School, catering for years 10 to 12. Others to go included Coburg High School, Newlands High School and Moreland High School, which is now Kangan Batman TAFE.
Ms Hall says the educational black hole created by these cuts is forcing families out of the area, breaking up primary school friendships and fracturing the community. "We know that the department are very much against having a new school but we will just keep going because we know we have a very, very strong case and the parental support is there," Ms Hall says.
The same view has driven SKY, which also taps into that staple of school-gate conversation: where will you send your children to high school?
It is a question that will be answered when Ms Pike releases the findings of an independent consultant's review of the area's secondary needs.
Although the report by Spatial Vision has been completed, SKY spokeswoman Janine Lloyd has so far declined to comment on its findings.
"If they decide it can move forward, it's out of SKY's hands then," she says.
The group's polling of local parents found that 248 year 7 and 8 students would attend a new high school in the inner west next year - enough, it says, to justify a new school. However, an earlier departmental report found potential student numbers would not support a high school.
There is no co-educational public high school within five kilometres of Yarraville. With five primary schools close by, the lack of a high school weighs heavily on many.
The local school Footscray High - alma mater to generations of local residents, including former education minister Lynne Kosky - was, in spite of its name, located in Yarraville. It closed in 1996, another victim of the Kennett government's cuts. Now the area's secondary students travel to Footscray City Secondary College, Williamstown High or beyond. Last year 200 of the area's graduating grade 6 students went to 15 high schools.
Ms Lloyd says many families whose children are nearing high-school age are anxious because they can't plan for their secondary schooling. Others are simply leaving.
She says up to 10 per cent of house sales in the area are due to families selling to move closer to a secondary school.
Such claims have not persuaded everyone of the merits of their case. Critics accuse the group of middle-class snobbery, of looking to build an enclave, and of racism for not accepting the established schools in the region.
"Racism and snobbery have nothing to do with wanting a local high school," Ms Lloyd says. "We had a school and we need that school back."
She argues that many neighbouring high schools such as Williamstown High are at capacity, and others, such as Footscray City and Maribyrnong secondary colleges, are filling fast."This is a capacity and location issue. Our region needs more secondary college facilities as there is a huge hole in the area."
Getting a high school built from scratch is no easy task but both the Coburg and Yarraville groups use demographics to support their cases. There's a baby boom, they argue, and populations are growing fast.
HSC conducted a survey of 263 local families, representing 556 children, which showed 96 per cent would support a new high school in Coburg. Ms Hall argues that neighbouring high schools are almost full and difficult to get to by public transport, and the nearest school, Coburg Senior High, caters only to years 10 to 12.
"It shouldn't be that hard to send your children to school," she says. "Children are just going off in all directions and no one's happy with their options."
Local real estate agent Rocco Siciliano deals with about four families each month who sell to move closer to secondary schools.
"They are young families with two or three kids who don't want to move but don't have an option," he says.
At Coburg Primary School, principal Jennifer Strachan finds herself fielding questions about high schools as early as prep enrolment interviews.
"They always ask, 'Where do they go after grade 6?' " she says. - The Age
Chris Bonnor, public education advocate and co-author of The Stupid Country - How Australia Is Dismant-ling Public Education, says the pressure for high schools in these areas is the direct result of the Kennett government cuts, which closed more than 300 schools in the state, with many sold to make way for housing.
"It was inevitable that the pressure would mount as young people came back," he says.
He believes a local high school is more than bricks and mortar; it is the heart of a community.
"It often keeps a community together," he says. "When you take a community's focus away from the local and put it somewhere else, their loyalty goes with them because people become disconnected."
When it closed in 1996, Footscray High was one of three schools to go in Yarraville. Rows of neat, semi-detached brick townhouses now line the site, a wedge of high-density development hemmed by Wembley Avenue, the Princes Freeway and sporting fields.
Thanks to a 30 per cent increase in Maribyrnong's birth rates since 2006, most of these homes are occupied by young parents and their preschool children.
This demographic turnaround is not news to Cate Hall, who lives in Coburg North, also in the midst of a baby boom.
"Coburg has the greatest population growth in children of all suburbs in Moreland," she says. "Where will all these children go?"-The Age
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