Union Community

We hope all of you have stayed well and safe since we emailed you about our community meeting last November to update you on our construction of our middle school campus at 4545 Union Avenue in the Cambrian community.

We thank you for your patience during our construction phase, especially those neighbors immediately adjacent neighbors to our campus.

Construction, which began in June 2020, is now complete and students will be returning for full in-person learning for the 2021-22 school year.

There will be a variety of small, grade-level orientations and activities over the next two weeks and classes for Harker’s 129th academic year officially start on Mon., Aug. 23.

As you can imagine, the middle school students are very excited, not only to come back to in-person school, but to do so on their brand-new campus, and we are equally excited to welcome them.

We have implemented comprehensive shuttle and carpool programs to ensure Harker meets the traffic requirements agreed upon with the neighbors and the city. We will also be educating and reminding our parents, via orientations and emails, to follow all traffic safety regulations and to be respectful of our neighbors and community.

Each year, as school begins, it often takes a week or two for new parents and students to become acclimated to parking lot dynamics, drop-off routines, and traffic flow issues. As this is our first year on this new campus, everyone and every routine is new, and there will likely be some delays and slow-moving vehicles in and around our campus. We hope that our cars do not back into Union Avenue; however, it might be prudent to avoid the entrance area to our campus during the drop-off time in particular (7:30-8:30 a.m.) for the week of August 23. We do appreciate your patience as we work out any kinks that are sure to occur in the first few weeks of school. Rest assured that we will be swift and diligent in rectifying any problems that occur as our families adjust to the new campus.

By way of background, we operated our school year program almost entirely remotely for the 2020-21 school year to keep our community safe. We were able to operate our summer programs, open to all students, the past two summers following all necessary mandates.

We have three San Jose campuses, one for each of our divisions:

•	Lower School (K-5): 4300 Bucknall Avenue

•	Middle School (Gr. 6-8): 4545 Union Avenue

•	Upper School (Gr. 9-12): 500 Saratoga Avenue

Since we purchased the Union Avenue property in 2012, we have been committed to being good neighbors in the Cambrian community. Good communication and working partnerships with our neighbors at each of our campuses is part of that commitment, and we welcome any suggestions, concerns or questions you may have. You can email neighbors@harker.org or call us at 408.248.2510 any time. You can also subscribe to regular email updates from us here: https://www.harker.org/about/good-neighbors/subscribe

Thank you, and take good care,

Brian Yager, Head of School
Visit Harker’s Good Neighbors Webpage