Teachers Face Challenges With Transportation

ByGEOFFREYFRANC

ByGEOFFREYFRANC

At 6:30 a.m., most students are just waking up, or still asleep. But not math teacher Adam Whistler. Instead, he’s putting on a podcast or audiobook — usually related to politics or television — and starting his hour-long commute from Oakland to Menlo.

Whistler said he aims to be at school around 8 a.m., but to do that, he can’t leave later than 6:30. If he leaves even a mere 15 minutes later, he could end up 45 minutes late due to a sudden build up of traffic on his route.

Whistler used to live in an apartment in San Francisco with his wife, who works in the financial district. But when the pandemic hit, they found their apartment was too small for both of them to work in and began searching for a bigger place to rent. “We got really lucky and found a great little house [...] about five minutes from the BART line for my wife to get to work really easily,” he said. Being able to walk to a BART station gives Whistler the opportunity to commute to Menlo by train, but he said he only took the train once last semester because it takes 90 minutes each way. When he does take the train, he’s able to grade and plan lessons during his commute. “The day I took the train, I had a really great day,” he said. “Driving is stressful.”

Similarly, photography and animation teacher Amanda Kyed — who lives with her husband in the West Portal neighborhood of San Fran- cisco — said that taking public transit would add another hour to her commute in each direction. Instead, Kyed leaves her home in her car around 6:50 every morning. This gets her to school around 7:30. Kyed said she encounters a similar problem to Whistler, where if she leaves later than her usual time, she hits heavy traffic which lengthens her 40 minute commute to an hour.

Kyed moved to San Francisco during the pandemic, when her husband could still work remotely for his job in Los Angeles. She didn’t have a job when they moved to the Bay Area, so proximity to her husband’s family and friends was the driving factor in their choice of location. “We live about a mile away from everyone he’s related to,” Kyed said.

English teacher Whitney Newton also moved during the pandemic. She relocated from El Granada (near Half Moon Bay) to Morgan Hill (south of San Jose). Newton and her husband had bought a house in El Granada in 2015, but they moved to Morgan Hill in 2020 for her husband’s job, then back to El Granada in 2022.

When Newton and her husband started looking to buy a house back in 2015, they initially hoped to take advantage of the Faculty Housing Loan Program, a loan program for Menlo faculty trying to put money down on a house. But Newton and her husband kept getting outbid in the competitive Redwood City housing market.

Their struggle, however, soon revealed itself to be a blessing in disguise. After reluctantly visiting a house in El Granada, Newton fell in love. “I saw the house, I saw the ocean from our living room, and I was like, ‘Oh, yeah, this is where we’re gonna live,’” Newton said. “It was literally the best decision I've ever made in my life.” From El Granada, Newton says it generally takes around 45 minutes to drive to Menlo.

Newton had sought out a condo in Morgan Hill close to the Caltrain station in the town, imagining she could take the train to the station in Menlo Park instead of driving. But, similar to Kyed, she soon discovered that public transportation wasn’t a vi able option. “I tried to [take the train] one day, and it took me longer, was going to cost me about 20 bucks a day — which is more than it was costing me in gas — and one of the trains got canceled and it ended up being a total disaster, and my husband had to pick me up,” Newton said.

After this experience, Newton drove to work from Morgan Hill until she moved back to El Granada where it took her around 90 minutes to get to school because of traffic.

The teacher with perhaps the longest commute is Chief of Insti tutional Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging Keith Wheeler. While Wheeler spends most of his time in the Bay Area, his two eighth grade sons in Los Angeles keep him flying back and forth. Wheeler said that, although he frequently checks in with his children through FaceTime and text, he tries to be in Los Angeles for his boys’ activities. “I remember like my first or second year, sometimes I would fly back during a week when I didn’t have any event going on here, and I would coach my sons or be at my sons’ basketball practice,” he said.