Three hours before her 8 a.m. classes begin, senior Mya Shiloh is already on her way to San Jose’s Lincoln High, nestled into her favorite seat on the morning’s first ACE commuter train and trying to grab a few winks after waking up at 4 a.m. at her home in Tracy.
She’ll be back on the train by 3:30 p.m., and home more than 12 hours after she left. Her schedule cuts into activities she loves, like school clubs and drama, as well as socializing and sleep — but it’s the price she’s chosen to pay to stay in her beloved high school after rent hikes priced her family out of San Jose.
Mya, 17, is among thousands of school children who have been uprooted by the Bay Area’s high housing costs, and one of a small but growing number who embark on long daily commutes this month as they go back to school.
A tight and astronomically expensive housing market is forcing families to face wrenching choices: to uproot, make marathon drives or cram together. But the market is also reshaping the size and makeup of some Bay Area schools, as displaced families leave and re-enroll their children elsewhere.
In the San Mateo-Foster City School District, for example, enrollment grew last year despite the loss of 500 low-income students who left the area, said Assistant Superintendent Donna Lewis. That’s because more students from wealthier families came into the district. But in lower-income communities, many schools have seen enrollment fall as families are priced out.
“It catches your attention, because you know how desperate the families are,” said Stephen McMahon, deputy superintendent of San Jose Unified. The district has been granting more transfers to kids like Mya whose families move away. “Everything they have is here, but they can’t afford to live here.”
For Mya, the transfer has its trade-offs.
“Sometimes I look at my SnapChat when I’m waking up and my friends are posting,” she said. “I go, ‘What are you doing?’ And they’re like, ‘What are you doing?’”S”
What she’s doing is sticking to a disciplined routine that allows her to take AP and honors classes, keep her friends and continue with dance and music at San Jose Unified’s performing arts magnet.
While determined parents like Mya’s map out precise schedules to keep their children in local schools, the flight of poor families has drained students — and state funds — from many school districts.
Last year, Ravenswood City School District in East Palo Alto lost 150 students. “Our enrollment has fallen drastically over the last couple of years,” said Student Services Director Ruth Woods. Enrollment has also dropped in districts in downtown and East San Jose, Redwood City, Emeryville, Newark and Union City.
Vanishing are families like Nancy Dominguez’s, who said her landlord raised the rent by $200 for a Redwood City garage where they lived and demanded they pay or vacate within five days. The family of four eventually moved to Modesto.
But in regionwide gentrification, demand is growing for schools in San Jose’s Willow Glen and Almaden Valley, and in Palo Alto, Millbrae, Fremont and San Ramon — destination districts where homes sell for $1 million and more.
The enrollment boomtown is Dublin, whose school population has more than doubled in 10 years. Migration is also boosting the school-age population in affordable Delta and valley towns like Pittsburg, Martinez, Tracy, Stockton and Manteca.
Earlier this year, Jemima Agudelo reluctantly made a decision that still makes her cry. Desperate to move out of a Daly City home shared by six adults and three children, Agudelo pulled her older son out of a charter school, where the once-struggling first-grader was thriving, and moved to Los Banos. When school starts, she plans to drive her sons an hour away to Hollister, where she’s found day care and a high-performing charter school.
“We finally have that two-bedroom, what everyone wants,” she said. But school, jobs, family and services are all far away from Los Banos, said Agudelo, who hopes to eventually earn a nursing degree and perhaps afford a place in the Bay Area.
Even a middle-class income offers no housing security.
“I make six figures,” said Mya’s mother, Cammie Farmer, 34, a single mom with four other children. Three years ago, she downsized everyone into a two-bedroom apartment in San Jose, going for $1,800. When the rent went up by $300 last year, she realized, “I can’t keep living here.”
She moved to Tracy, where she pays nearly as much — $2,000 — but has a 4-bedroom home with a yard. Initially, she commuted with her five kids, to keep Mya at Lincoln, three younger kids in a Campbell elementary school and the 2-year-old with his San Jose grandmother.
After half a year, with everyone exhausted, Farmer enrolled the three elementary students in Tracy schools — waking them with a 6:30 a.m. phone call and monitoring their morning and afternoon routines via iPad during her commute and from work.
“I’m a little bit of a zero-tolerance mom,” said Farmer, who ensures remotely that her kids get their homework done. She’s changed jobs and shortened her commute, to Oakland.
She instills in her children the lessons of planning, organization and structure that she learned after becoming a teenage mom while still in high school — and then going on to earn two degrees while working and raising kids.
Mya admits that last year, she couldn’t do as many activities as she had in her freshman and sophomore years, when she lived closer. But spending her senior at Lincoln is worth the commute.
“I love the school,” Mya said. “It’s perfect.”