The dispute at the Holy Cross Girls' School in Belfast, which has seen children subjected to daily abuse and attacks, shows no sign of being resolved, President Mary McAleese said today.
Ms McAleese repeated calls for political leaders to intervene to end the dispute in Ardoyne, north Belfast.
The alternative was another 30 years of sectarian hatred and killings, said Ms McAleese, who was herself driven from her Ardoyne home by loyalists as a child.
The President spent much of Friday with the parents, children and local priest Father Aidan Troy, who, for more than two months, has shielded children from the missiles and abuse hurled by loyalists.
The protesters from the Glenbryn area claim that the school run has provided cover for republican paramilitaries to enter their community.
Following the meetings she said today: "I didn't get any sense that there was a sign of resolution at all.
"The children have done nothing to incur the protest, they own nothing that can provide an answer."
Speaking on the RTÉ radio’s This Week programme, she added: "If you have a message you want the world to hear you do not use and abuse children in order to make that message heard. There are other vehicles, there must be better more human and decent ways."
Earlier in the week the protest was temporarily suspended on 11-plus exam day to allow the children to focus their minds.
Ms McAleese said: "Going up the road they felt such a sense of lightness and joy and real optimism and they began for a moment to believe that life could get back to normal.
"And then of course in the afternoon not only did the protest resume but it was resumed with spitting and bad language and the kinds of things that children should not have to endure." Ms McAleese was forced out of the area as a child when Loyalist attackers emptied two machine guns through the windows of her home on the peace line border.
"This has always been a place where territory has been marked in ways that are so inhumanely indecent and so awful. Much of the sectarian tensions that exist there are exactly as it was when I lived there.
"The leadership really does need to finally try to put in place the skills that are absent in the community for addressing issues without this kind of dreadful interface."
She added: "We have to find some way of addressing those people from whom we are estranged because if we do not there is going to be another 30 years of sectarianism and I do not think that is any gift to give a child."
PA