We have a variety of transportation options to help our busy families.
Transportation
The Harker School’s three divisions – lower, middle and upper – are on three distinct campuses. We offer a variety of transportation options for K-12 students to help our busy families around the greater Bay Area. Harker also provides a shuttle to athletic teams for their away games.
Intercampus Shuttle
Our campuses are connected by a free morning and evening intercampus shuttle. This provides the convenience for our families of dropping off and picking up all of your children at one campus; we’ll drive them to their respective campuses. Students K-12 may ride this shuttle.
Bus Service
As a service to our families, Harker provides a variety of home-to-school and school-to-home bus service on a defined daily schedule. The broadest range of services are provided to the middle school campus, as all middle school students must arrive either by carpool or bus due to campus access restrictions. As a result, in the morning this service is free for middle school students. Services run Monday through Friday on all dates in which school is in session, with some exceptions that are announced each school year.
Areas covered for the middle school: Peninsula, Palo Alto, Milpitas, Mountain View, Cupertino, Saratoga, Los Gatos, Campbell, Silver Creek, Willow Glen. The morning service from these areas is free for middle school students.
We have morning service available to all campuses from the Peninsula, Silver Creek and Cupertino. These are fee-based, as are all afternoon school-to-home buses.In addition to the intercampus shuttles in the afternoon, we offer school-to-home service to stops up the Peninsula and in Cupertino. Depending upon available resources, we offer routes that leave both right after school and others that allow students to participate in after-school activities and then head home after that.
Fees range from $8 to $10 per ride, based upon how many rides per week the service is used – the more rides, the lower the number. Fees are billed monthly and are based on the actual number of days your child rides per week.
We use SmartTag RFID technology to account for students on their bus, to make sure they are on the correct route and get off at the proper stop. Parents logging in to the software can also monitor progress of the bus and get a better sense of arrival times at the afternoon bus pickup points. This also is the system we use as the basis for accounting in ride billing.
If you would like more specific information about specific schedules and stop locations, please contact Brianna Alday, administrative assistant to the assistant head of school for student affairs, at 408.345.9685.
Silver Creek
- 6:55 a.m.: pickup at 474 Piercy Road.
- 7:35 a.m.: arrival at the Blackford campus. Lower school students will be escorted and transferred to the intercampus shuttle for arrival there at 7:50 a.m. Upper school students will transfer to an intercampus shuttle and arrive at the upper school by 7:50 a.m.
- There is no afternoon return service from Harker to Silver Creek.
Fremont
- 7:05 a.m.: pickup at James Leitch Elementary School, 47100 Fernald Avenue, Fremont, 94539.
- 7:35 a.m.: arrival at the Saratoga campus. Students traveling to Blackford or Bucknall will remain on the bus for their transport to those campuses, arriving Blackford at 7:49 a.m. and Bucknall at 8:05 a.m.
- 4:40, 4:50, 5:15 p.m. afternoon bus service departs from Saratoga, Blackford and Bucknall campuses. Arrival time at James Leitch Elementary School is 6:15 p.m.
Carpooling
Harker parents are encouraged to reach out to other parents to arrange car pools to and from school and after-school activities outside of Harker to support our sustainability efforts as a community. We are proud to partner with CarpooltoSchool to make planning easy and convenient for families.
Families of middle school students must carpool to or shuttle to campus. Due to city permit regulations we limit the car traffic that is allowed on campus each day. Family participation in utilizing CarpooltoSchool or organizing their own car pools is vital to the success of our traffic operations and commitment to being a good neighbor to the surrounding community.
Student Drivers
We provide student parking for our upper school students in a space-available program, with seniors earning first priority and remaining spots being awarded to students who have applied to the semester parking lottery program. When possible, the Office of Student Affairs will work with upper school students to find a transportation solution if they are unable to procure parking on campus.