“The day before yesterday, there was a gang of kids in the area off our garage ramp,” concerned resident Allan Aitken said last week. “I said with a smile it was private property and would they please find somewhere else.”

The problem has existed for years, according to Aitken, although it is more pronounced when it rains and the students seek shelter off school grounds during breaks. “The building immediately to our east, which has parking at ground level, was the perfect place because they could be shielded from the street,” he said, adding that at least once he summoned Westmount Public Security to shoo away the offenders.

While he lodged a complaint with the administration of Westmount High School, Aitken suggested the students may also be from the nearby Vanguard School. He said the two schools have agreed to hold their lunch breaks at different times, “which I think is a good start.”

Aitken's building is not the only one affected by the problem. The nearby offices of Rothenberg & Rothenberg and the adjoining condos have also attracted students who sit on the front steps, eating and smoking — and though possibly unrelated, their garage door was recently defaced by graffiti.

This ongoing situation prompted Rothenberg & Rothenberg administrator Helen Corrigan and condo association president Marie Claire Holland to visit Westmount High principal Michael Cristofaro and vice-principal Steven Erdelyi to let them know that students are not only loitering on their property but also leaving behind cigarette butts and litter.

Corrigan is quick to point out that the problem stems from the actions of a few.

"The students are generally well behaved when there are just one or two — but in a group they become very bravado," said Corrigan. "I recently went out one afternoon when it was raining. There were three students on the right of the entrance and two on the left, all smoking. They were polite and well behaved. But the week before, there had been three students there who were rowdy and making too much noise."

In an attempt to reduce the number of students who feel compelled to leave the school grounds in order to smoke, Westmount High recently hired an addiction counselor, in association with Royal West Academy.

Ste. Catherine Street resident Marilynn Vanderstaay isn’t satisfied that the matter is resolved. The real problem, she insists, is that the schools themselves “are not teaching the kids how to behave in a community. It’s not just that the kids are being bad ― and the word is bad ― but how are they going to know how to behave in the community when they eventually go to work?”

“They hang around the front of the building,” said Vanderstaay, who lives at the corner of Hillside Lane, directly across from the school. “They hang around here in the winter, especially because they can’t smoke in the schoolyard. Two years ago, they broke the front window. They don’t make room for the residents coming and going.”

She admitted that principal Cristofaro “did a really good job of cleaning up this problem” since then, but the students have simply moved westward — toward Rothenberg & Rothenberg and Aitken’s residence.

Erdelyi said the administration has been doing its very best to ensure the students behave themselves in the surrounding community. “Myself, Mr. Cristofaro and many of the teachers regularly go patrolling during lunch and recess,” he said. “The reality, though, is that we’re not the only school in the neighbourhood. In some cases it is Westmount High School students, but in the majority of the cases, from what we’ve seen, it’s not our students that have been disruptive. Any time we get a complaint, we investigate. The law is that no one is allowed to smoke on school property. There are some students who smoke cigarettes, much as we don’t like it. What we ask is that they try not to loiter in front of buildings.”