Interview of Jane Wheeler, October 19, 2022

Rohnert Park Public Library The History of Rohnert Park 60th Anniversary Oral History Project Interview of Jane Wheeler October 19, 2022 Interviewer : Megan Petersen Abstract : Jane Wheeler moved to Rohnert Park as a teenager along with her family at the end of 1959. After attending middle school and high school in Petaluma, Jane attended Sonoma State University, and eventually left Rohnert Park to experience things independently in San Francisco. She graduated from San Francisco State University and taught in Vallejo for fourteen years. Living in Rohnert Park Jane Wheeler had become a part of a rapidly developing community, that of which she returned to after deciding to serve as the principal for John Reed Elementary School, as well as Monte Vista Elementary School. With decades of teaching experience as well as her administrative role in the the Cotati-Rohnert Park School District for twenty-eight years, she was asked to teach at Sonoma State University. After forty-two years in the public education system, she began educating further generations of student teachers through SSU. Jane graduated from simply playing school with the younger children she babysat in Rohnert Park to academically influencing the lives of children and adults over decades. She knew she wanted to make a difference, and that she did. Through her extensive career in the educational system, Jane Wheeler has successfully achieved her goal in benefiting society through her decades of work. Megan : 00:03 Okay, so when and where were you born? Jane : 00:06 I was born in Marin County. We lived in Marin County and then came to Sonoma County. We were in Cloverdale for a few years, my father was working and then when we moved back, he had to go back to San Francisco and we moved to Rohnert Park at the end of 1959 in the early 1960s. Megan : 00:28 And what did you both your parents do for a living ? Jane : 00:30 So my father was an Internal Revenue Agent for the Alcohol Tobacco Tax Division, and he worked in wineries. That's why we were in Sonoma County and then when he went back to San Francisco, he still worked with them, but that's where he worked. And my mom was a teacher. When we moved here, she was offered a job in what was then the Cotati school district and she started teaching and she spent about 20 to 25 years working in Cotati-Rohnert Park School District primarily as a reading teacher. Megan : 01:00 What were some of your early memories of Rohnert Park ? Jane : 01:10 Well, I came to Rohnert Park as a young teenager and went to school in Petaluma. Rohnert Park was basically a housing development and I had never lived in a housing development where there were so many houses that were alike. Lots of people, the streets that you could ride bikes on and stuff like that and, I lived in houses but not like that. What I remember vividly after we lived here for a few months in the spring, was all the fields around the A section, and B section of Rohnert Park blossomed into these beautiful sweet peas. That's because this area was a seed farm before it was developed for housing. So for several years until more houses were constructed, which eliminated those beautiful flower fields, was my first memory of Rohnert Park is the wonderful, vivid view and scent of sweet peas in the spring. Megan : 02:12 Did they get rid of those? Jane : 02:13 They built houses over the land because they developed it. Megan : 02:17 So the A and B section that was something new to you as well? Jane : 02:29 So sort of a planned community, the developers that put it together sort of wanting to make it I don't know all the history, but sort of a planned community. And so they built the sections and they labeled them by letters, and all the streets in the section start with that letter. So we lived in A section and our street was Allen, people lived in the B and my school which was a later on section because in the south park park is the M section. So I don't know quite how far they are. Are there's an R and then else Oh, wow. So built over 50 years I guess. Megan : 03:17 I think that's something unique to this town because I've never like seen any town with those kinds of sections. Jane : 03:26 Well think about it, Rohnert Park didn't have a town center when we lived here. There are shopping areas now but you know some towns have like a city hall and all of that. And that came much later where the current library is and the police station and that's off of the expressway. That came a lot later on to be sort of a central government place in the town. Megan : 03:54 So when you moved here you were thirteen and there was no center of town at all. Jane : 04:01 No, there was a big deal, I don't think it was the first year but the second one of the two, where they built a grocery store, which is right now I think 49 or pet or something over off of Adrienne and South-West Boulevard. Megan : 04:16 There was only one grocery store? Jane : 04:18 There was none to begin with. There was nothing in Cotati except a little country store. This was a pretty rural area. In 1960 It changed very fast with building Megan : 04:37 What were your experiences within the schools as a student, parent or teacher? Jane : 04:41 So when I moved here there was no junior high, middle school, or high school in Rohnert Park. I went to middle school and high school in Petaluma. So we were bused there. My sister who's two years younger, actually went to elementary school in Cotati. That was the only school the first year we lived here and then she had a choice when they started a middle school high school in Rohnert Park a couple years later, to stay. Well she went to middle school in Petaluma, and then she could have stayed here but she's continued to Petaluma. So in the early 60s, they built more schools in Rohnert Park, including their middle school and high school. I don't know exactly how many years it took to build that up. Megan : 05:32 So past elementary school, before you got here, they had to go outside of the county for school? Jane : 05:42 No outside of the town, but it was in the area. We rode buses into Petaluma, seven miles away. Megan : 05:48 Oh, so only seven miles. Jane : 05:57 Well, think about it. Like I said Petaluma in particular was a huge agricultural area and still is to some degree, but a lot of that's been eliminated. And so a lot of people lived out on farms and little ranchettes and things like that. So this housing development was a little new thing. But I went to school with a lot of kids whose families in Petaluma owned big dairy farms and chicken farms and that kind of thing, because that's what the area was known for. Megan : 06:32 Not now. Jane : 06:34 A little bit in the West Megan : 06:40 what were your experiences with the library, the public library? Jane : 06:44 I grew up in a family where we went to the library wherever we lived all the time, that was just part of our life to go to the library. Story hours get books read, because we don't just read a lot. So when we moved here, and it was just the very beginning town, there was a tiny little Sonoma County Public Library in downtown Cotati in a little house that I think is a realtor now. And we could go there, and the walk was a hefty walk, but we could walk from our house to that library. There was a librarian whose name was Marguerite Hahn. And she was this older lady who I guess was a librarian and she did story hours and we could get books and they were associated with the Sonoma County Library System. So they brought books back and forth between the main library in Santa Rosa at the time. So we have a library and we used to go quite regularly. Marguerite Hahn, just a little aside, was really known in this town when it first began. Years later, they named a school for her in the Cotati Rohnert Park School District and it's called Marguerite Hahn Elementary School in the north end of town. And her daughter was actually a teacher in Cotati Rohnert Park for many years, too. Megan : 08:17 Was there another librarian at the library, the original one? Jane : 08:24 that's the only person I remember? It was a tiny little library. Megan : 08:31 What roles did the library play in your life and in the broader community? Jane : 08:36 So I mentioned about the library for myself, just wherever we lived, but in Rohnert Park after they moved from this library, they built two libraries in Rohnert Park over the many years and the first one it's over sort of near in the shopping center, near where the Safeway is there. That was the original library and it was quite nice when they built it. I can't say when it was built exactly. Because it was beyond my years of still living here. But my sister, who is and was a librarian at Sonoma County, I know was working as a librarian, and she worked through a variety of libraries. And I think she wasn't on park for a short while before she went to other places too. So that was probably built, I'm gonna say, early 70s. It was a big deal when it was built i will say that and my family was very involved there. The library in Rohnert Park has a very active group called Friends of the Library that raises lots of money to buy books for the library and support programs and things. And that was started many, many, many years ago, and my mom was part of that early on, she was for many years on the Friends of the library. And I know other people that are too, it�s still going strong. Megan : 10:05 Was the Friends of the Library established before your family moved here? Jane : 10:09 Not that I'm aware of. I remember it from when they built the big library. Most of the libraries in Sonoma County have a group called Friends of the Library that raise money. It's one of my charities, I donate books when I'm getting rid of them to the Rohnert Park Library to support their program because one of the things they do is have a book sale several times a year. It's a great place for teachers to go get books for their classroom libraries, and they really support that so I like to support them. Megan : 10:42 Wow, there's a lot of people that are just centered around the library. Jane : 10:48 You know, I can't speak to what most people are around, that just happens to be my experience with the library. I know the schools in Rohnert Park really have always had a close relationship, really valuing the library, the librarians and the children's librarians in the Rohnert Park Library, this was when I was a principal, have always come to reach out to the school communities of children to encourage them to come and take part in the summer programs and just throughout the year. So yeah, there was a pretty close relationship I think that has endured for many years. Megan : 11:25 Yeah, I think that's pretty unique to just this town. Jane : 11:27 I don't know. Well, I do know other communities that have strong libraries, but I can't say. Megan : 11:39 what sections Did you live in? And how did that shape your experience in Rohnert Park? Jane : 11:50 Well we only lived in one section when we moved here. It was a brand new house. That was very exciting to my sister and I because we've never lived in a house that was brand new, but because this was a housing development, you know, and so when we moved here, there was the A section and the B section. And like I said, I was in middle school and high school and I think most teenagers are looking for their peer groups. And so if you want to say shaped my life, my peer group were primarily the kids that I went to school with from Rohnert Park because we went seven miles away to Petaluma, and then we came back, and we were here. So of course, we all sought out each other. We were friends that played, we weren't a huge group, but it was enough. You know, we rode bikes. We went to the swimming pool. Towards the end of my high school year the recreation department and Rohnert Park got started and they had activities for kids, but there wasn't a tremendous already built up infrastructure of support things for kids. There were playgrounds, swimming pools, that kind of thing. Megan : 13:07 They had swimming pools and only one grocery store? Jane : 13:10 The swimming pool preceded the grocery store, it was here before. Jane :13:17 Because this was a planned community, when the developers plan the community with the housing, part of it was they wanted every section to have their own park. So the A park had a swimming pool that went with it, and not all areas have swimming pools in all of them. But many years later, I was the principal at Monte Vista, the M section has a pool and they have a park and actually the school and the park sort of shared some land. The park used what was some officially Monte Vista for the baseball field, but we always had access to it, was sort of a shared thing. So yes, there was relationship. Megan : 14:07 How did the planned nature of the town impact everyday life in Rohnert Park? Jane : 14:13 I was a teenager. I don't know what my life would have been like. Megan : 14:20 What role did churches or other religious institutions play in your life in Rohnert Park? Jane : 14:24 Well, when we moved here, the only church was in Cotati. It was called St. Joseph's Catholic Church. But we were Protestant and I don't know how my mom found this church but there was another church that was started and it was located in Cotati. It was the Faith Presbyterian Church. We met in an old hall Oddfellows Hall. The building is still down there across from some kind of pizza place thats on Redwood highway. Anyway, that's where we went to church at first and then again, I'm not sure of all the details. But I remember when I was then a teenager, so in five or six years, Faith Presbyterian Church built the first church, as I understand it, that was in Rohnert Park, and it's over on Arlen drive in the old A section. It was our church. Megan : 15:26 So there's an old A section and a new A section ? Jane : 15:29 In the old A section is what I'm saying was the first church Megan : 15:36 what was your first job in Rohnert Park or in the area? Jane : 15:39 Okay. Well, actually, I did do some work when they started with the recreation department. I just remember that wasn't paid for it. You know, it was like we were teenagers with nothing to do and we just took part and sort of worked with the younger kids. I knew I was going to be a teacher so it was perfect for me. And then I also had an opportunity one summer when my mother was teaching summer school. The John Reed Elementary was the first elementary school in Rohnert Park, and they invited me to come and I was sort of an unofficial aide. I was 17 You know, it wasn't very old. But I did all kinds of things in the school and just got to experience, again not paid but it was okay, It was great because I knew I wanted to be a teacher at some point. But then I left because I went away to college. I got married. My first teaching job was in Vallejo and I spent 14 years there, but I was looking to become a school administrator and the assistant superintendent at the time in Cotati Rohnert Park was aware of me and another person and invited us to apply for jobs here and I hadn't really ever thought about doing that. And I applied for a principalship here and I was given the job. So I came back and which seemed funny. And when I was interviewed, it was even funnier, there was two people on the interview team who knew who I was because when I was a kid I was a babysitter for their kids. Most people did not know me because I had a married name so it was fine. So I was hired as the principal at John Reed, which was the first elementary school and there is a little aside to John Reed even though I never went to school here. When I graduated from high school the John Reed PTA, Parent Teacher Association, awarded $100 scholarship to a graduating senior who lived in Rohnert Park and I was the recipient of the John Reed scholarship the year I graduated from high school. Now $100 Doesn't sound like a lot but tuition at Sonoma State was pretty cheap in 1964 and it helped a lot. So anyway, so then it was unusual to me that I came back and I was the principal there for four years. And while I was the principal there, there was discussion about building a new school in the south end of town, the Monte Vista section. I thought, "how exciting to be part of the brand new school", and I applied and I was given that job. And so in 1990, we opened Monte Vista where I was the principal and it's very unusual that I got to stay as the principal. I loved it for 23 years. I didn't want to go anywhere else. I loved being at a school I got to start and see grow over all the years. It's unusual. Megan : 19:00 How did Rohnert Park change over the first decade or two that you lived here? Jane : 19:04 Well, I really only lived here the first decade because I left to go to college in my junior year in college. What I would say, well a couple of things that changed, lots of housing built up so I talked about living in the A and B section. And then the C section came and I have, it's more vague memories about the D section and the L section sort of came in then because like I said, I went to college and so I wasn't really focusing on the development. I was aware though because that's how I socialized, was with the kids here, but when when I graduated from Petaluma High I went to Sonoma State for my first two years. And we talked about that how Sonoma State was on a temporary campus in the A section between the A and the B section of Rohnert Park and by then we had a grocery store and it was right there. It's like I said, I think it's called 49 and pet there and there's some other buildings. So for the first two years, almost two years I was in college at Sonoma State. We were in this temporary campus that were in what looked like apartment buildings but they had been made into classrooms. While at that same time, they were building the permanent campus. And so I was here when we moved to the permanent campus, where we are right now. And there were only two buildings on the campus, Stevenson, and Darwin. And there was lots of mud and not lots of landscaping the first semester, but that got better. So I spent about a year here before I decided I wanted to go somewhere else and leave home and explore the world. So I ended up graduating from San Francisco State. Megan : 21:00 Did you transfer directly to San Francisco State? Jane : 21:03 I went to a couple of places, I went to San Jose State and decided that was too big for me. And so I took a year off and worked in San Francisco, and probably grew up because I was pretty young when I started college. I was 17, and I loved living in the city and so I went back to San Francisco State, graduated, and got my teaching credential there. Megan : 21:44 What do you think some of the major milestones in the city's history during your lifetime were and could you talk about your perspective on these events? Jane : 21:53 Well, I can only speak I speak of things with big gaps in time. Obviously, I talked about how Rohnert Park was just growing, growing, growing. It's sort of indicative of I think, what has happened all over Sonoma County, because I actually remember Petaluma was a pretty small town. You don't know the area but the whole east side of highway 101 which is now all housing, that was not housing when I went to high school there, that was out in the country. You know, that's how I learned to drive were on all these backcountry roads. But Rohnert Park was really growing. I can't speak to Santa Rosa, so what I remember milestones were just more and more housing. And at that time, it was a fairly easy commute to San Francisco. You know, it used to take about 45 minutes to an hour at the most to commute to San Francisco. People did that and it was no problem. I mean, it's much harder now to commute everywhere. But I have a vivid memory in high school of sitting in a government class and having someone come and talk to us about the fact that, what he told us was that from Santa Rosa all the way to San Jose will be nothing but houses all the way. And he's right, it is now, probably took 50 years to be that way but it seemed like in the 70s it just kept growing a ton. That's what my perspective is about, I remember park, that it was growing. But of course I wasn't living here at the time. By then I was living in Berkeley, and working in Vallejo. But I certainly saw it when I came back in 1985 when I came to Rohnert Park as a principal. I was just amazed at how much more of a town Rohnert Park was than when I lived here because grocery stores aside there was you know, there was Safeway and there was all kinds of stores mostly on Southwest and commerce boulevards, but since then they just kept growing and there's more and more. Railey�s wasn't there to begin with, but it came really soon. So Rohnert Park became much more of a town, they built the city center or the government offices, two of them, a smaller one and now the bigger one that they have. And the the recreation department became really well known in Sonoma County for all the services that provided things for kids. They built the performing arts circles, Performing Arts Center. I mean, I know Sonoma State has the Green Music Center now but before that there was Sprekels and still is the Performing Arts Center where they bring plays and music, so it became a city with lots of offerings for people. Obviously, lots of shopping centers and restaurants and things. Although, if I was going to say, I think this is a community that would embrace the food. But then I live in a city in Berkeley where you know, these food centric places are just part of the culture too. I know that's a little aside, but it grew as a city to serve the people. I know the public radio station is established here. Light industry started to come in to to support the community and give some tax basis to it. So it evolved somewhat from a more agricultural area to being a much more suburban area. Megan : 26:14 What's the relationship between Cotati and Rohnert Park and how did it change over time? Jane : 26:20 Well I can only go from my memory. So I don't particularly know all the details. So I said there wasn't really a grocery store here when we moved here. Cotati was a just a little town, a little hub, there's a little hub in Cotati and there was two little, I would say they weren't like 7-11s but they were no bigger than a seven eleven, that were grocery stores, like little country grocery stores. If you wanted to go to a big grocery store, you went to Santa Rosa, or Petaluma, so that was one difference. The only post office when we first started was in Cotati. So there was a dependence. The only elementary school when we first moved here was Cotati Elementary school which is now the Cotati police station by the way. There was a relationship, but people, most people that lived in Cotati, I think were wary of a big housing development coming in, and so it took a long time to sort of develop Megan : 27:35 Longer than Rohnert park? Jane : 27:37 Well, Cotati had been here for 100 years. There aren't housing developments in Cotati to the same degree, and they came later, that there are in Rohnert Park you know, thousands of houses to hundreds of houses that have been built, they're little housing developments. I think now it's much more integrated. People go, I talked about restaurants, Cotati has the unusual restaurants, you know, the little different, quirky restaurants kind of. I mean, not chains you know, there's like a Japanese restaurant, that kind of thing, that kind of place. Megan : 28:25 We already discussed this a little bit, but what's the relationship between Sonoma State and Rohnert Park? Jane : 28:35 When I first went to Sonoma State, believe it or not, I used to babysit for a lot of professors because many of them lived in Santa Rosa, not Rohnert Park. Some lived here too. So I think that has slowly evolved over time to to where the college and the town really integrate. I don't know how much they integrate and they certainly are friendly neighbors I think. The community uses the amenities of Sonoma State and Sonoma State, certainly in the teacher education program, has developed a strong relationship with the Cotati Rohnert Park Unified School District at all levels too. I'm not really aware of all the other relationships that they might have with the community in the same way, because there's other departments, you know, I don't know, like, what does nursing do? Do they, you know, work with the medical facilities or whatever. I don't really know about that particular relationship. But I live in a university town, Berkeley, and like I say there's separateness and then there's obviously integration that goes across. So just by virtue of people using all the amenities in the community, and the community being aware of who their consumers are, who's going to come. Megan : 30:09 Did you want to skip over the Hewlett Packard plant? Jane : 30:12 I can talk about Hewlett Packard. I remember when Hewlett Packard came. Well, I mean, it was here when I got here. When we built Monte Vista it is literally walking distance, two blocks, to what was then Hewlett Packard. And in the beginning, there was lots of talk about how Hewlett Packard and the school district can work together. And we did we had Hewlett Packard engineers and scientists were very involved in working with the school district and developing a hands on science curriculum that we call the materials in science and technology. I think I hope that's the right. I hope I got the name right. It's been so long ago, but they came and they were part of that. People from Hewlett Packard, and Hewlett Packard, eventually spun off and became Agilent, which is the Hewlett Packard company, but they were also very involved in helping develop technology High School, which is a science based and technology based high school, there was an emphasis in science and technology. They were very involved with my school. We had partners. My school became a partner within a company in Marin County called Autodesk foundation and Hewlett Packard and Agilent were part of it, and we created project based learning and they were resources for us, in how engineers approach problem solving and how we can teach that to kids to do well at learning, how to learn not just facts, but how to apply what they learn in real life situations and so we did that. So there was a relationship that lasted but Hewlett Packard spun off divisions as companies do, and that became Agilent. And some of their divisions changed, basically and then eventually, Hewlett Packard decided to sell its division down here and moved it elsewhere. Part of it moved to Idaho, I don't remember where else. So that sort of diminished from the school in that partnership. We were still a partnership with this company in Marin County for a longer time than Hewlett Packard. So that was the relationship, but because of, I think, obviously a company having goals that they have to address, you know, it wasn't always sustained long term because things changed in terms of what their business was. Megan : 32:58 How did its closure in the 2000s affect the city? Jane : 33:04 Well, I'm trying to think about it. I'm gonna say from my own perspective with my school, it really didn�t. I mean, people, a lot of the people that worked there because they were also of manufacturing, not just engineering, but manufacturing, too. I think a lot of people stayed in the area because there were a lot of different technology companies at that time. Petaluma had a bunch too so I don't think Hewlett Packard itself made a big difference when it left, at least from my school standpoint, I don't know tax wise or what happened. I will say though, the technology boom of the late 90's, early 2000's dissipated somewhat in Sonoma County, about the mid 2000s. And I certainly saw a change in my population. Nokia, which was a phone company, you know, were in Petaluma. There were a lot of them and so we saw a fairly significant turnover in population with engineers that work for these companies finding jobs elsewhere, Cisco left too for a bit, so things did change somewhat. And it was also a time that was just economically hard for schools period. Wasn't just because of those businesses, it was societal more than anything. Megan : 34:43 How have real estate development and suburban growth affected Rohnert Park? Jane : 34:52 I'm not really sure about that. I will say that there's a lot of people that have stayed in Rohnert Park so there's whereas when it first started, it was a lot of young families. For example, lots of young families, growing schools and things like that. So Rohnert Park in the 80s and 90s. Our schools were really big. We've closed schools because people stayed in their houses and not moved. So there's an older population now that there wasn't as much of earlier on in the history of it. So I imagine that that's changed some of the effects with the city having more of an older population. I know in the M section before I left as a principal, we were seeing houses turn over as people outgrew them. They grew into their kids left home, some of them did. And we saw a more culturally diverse population coming in, which was exciting to know that our schools are starting to reflect what California is more like as a whole. So I think those are some of the changes. I don't know how it's affected values or anything like that. So Megan : 36:19 Could you speak a little bit more about the financial issues with the educational system, you said that they're struggling financially? Jane : 36:27 Oh, well, just my you know, I've worked in education for 50 years, and the last 10 years at Sonoma State, but schools are dependent on funding for the most part from the state of California, in California. Most of our funding comes from there and when the economy is doing well, funding does well. When it's not doing well, cuts are made a lot of times in education. It hasn't been as severe recently, as it was, I would say. I've probably been through about four cycles as an educator where money has looked good and then they dried up kind of thing. And so that does affect what you can do. There was at one time, just before I retired, so this is in the mid 2000s that is after the bubble of 2008, that took until about 2014 to come out. So it took about four to six years, not just here, statewide. We had to make cuts in our district, in terms of also for administrators, we cut our days, the number of days we worked, that we were paid for, you know, districts had to look hard, but always trying to keep the focus on serving the kids. And so it's a hard place that schools find themselves many times. Right now the economy in California is pretty good. And there's a lot of resources going back into schools. I wish there was a different funding way, a way that we could do funding that ensured steady and direct funding, but in my history in education, I've not seen that, but this has been a long cycle. So I hope it continues for a while. Megan : 36:27 How does the construction of the Graton Rancheria casino impact Rohnert Park? Jane : 39:46 Well, that really happened after I left but there was a lot of discussion at the government level about the the Graton Rancheria casino, and should it be coming here? There were a lot of people in the community that didn't want it and a lot that did want it. I do know, and this was big because they opened just as I was I retired as a principal. I do know that the schools did see a growth in enrollment by people that came to work at the casino. I know the casino also does have some kind of a relationship with the school district to give them funding for programs and things like that. And I don't know what they do with the community as a whole in addition to that. Megan : 40:48 how would you describe local politics in Rohnert Park and how have these changed over the time that you've lived here? I know you haven't lived here very long. Jane : 40:57 For a long time I haven't lived here. You know, I do know that there's a lot of people that are very happy for a long term time, have been very active on the city council and really care about the community and run for office many times over but then obviously people get older and newer people come in. So I think there's a fairly active group that really cares about the governance of the city and is active in that, but I don't know really the details of it. Megan : 41:37 How would you describe Rohnert Parks placed in Sonoma County today? And what's the city's relationship to Santa Rosa and the rest of the county? Jane : 41:45 I really can't answer because I don't live here and I don't read the local papers about the school district. Megan : 42:05 How could you describe Roanoke Park today to someone who has never visited here? Jane : 42:17 Well, I think if someone was driving through most of Rohnert Park they would see neighborhoods of houses where families live because you see kids out playing and going to the park. I mean, if they were just driving through that's what they would see. If they drove by the parks they would see lots of sports activities going on that kind of thing. I think they'd see a lot of opportunities for different kinds of shopping. I mean, you have almost every store in the world that you could possibly want here. It's you know, Target, Costco, the grocery stores, gas stations. Because a lot of people commute from here, I think there is a hub for city life here. One thing I do know I don't know if they still do it, but the Public Safety Department has always tried to really reach out and be aware and that's why they call it public safety as opposed to police to reach out and they've always tried to develop those community relationships, but I don't know what you'd say. You drive through it, you see a town, you see people, they take care of their houses, they're obviously proud to live here I think for the most part, you know, as I would hope people are proud to live where they live. I think they'd see real variety in the people that do live here. When I first lived here, it was primarily white/Caucasian, when we first moved here, but that changed over time, which is reflective of California's population, as it should be. Megan : 44:12 Is there anything important about Rohnert Park's modern history that I didn't ask about? Jane : 44:20 I'm not sure that I would know exactly how to answer that. I think they continually, and I'm thinking it was the council in particular, really continually try to have people be proud of the community they live in and be proud of what is offered to people in this community. It's not like you'd say a small town and parts of it are small town like, but there's so many people it's not quite that much. There's great neighborhood synergy, certainly. I know in the M section, which is where my school was, people in that kind of, Im thinking of Halloween coming, people went all out to draw the community to see all kinds of celebration around different holidays and things like that. So I don't know I really can't answer that very specifically. Megan : 45:21 Do you know of anyone else who should be interviewed in your opinion in the future? Jane : 45:25 My understanding is that people have been identified. Already the names I shared have primarily been already identified and interviewed. Megan : 45:37 Yeah, I think he included that in there because he wanted names for future classes to do. Jane : 45:48 Well, I would say if he does all that I'll throw a name out if they I mean there's my sister's Patti Lewis, Patricia Lewis. And the only reason I mentioned her is because she was she's very involved with the library, and she was the children's and young adult services librarian for Sonoma County. And she also graduated from Sonoma State so I know there's a lot of people. Megan : 46:24 We kind of did talk about the size of Rohnert Park, but that was one of my questions, did the size of Rohnert Park have an influence on your childhood experience? Jane : 46:31 I don't know. Megan : 46:46 Being a part of the public school system and being principal for 23 years at Monte Vista, how did you become involved with Sonoma States student teaching program ? Jane : 46:58 We spent, when the school first started, immediately discussions with Sonoma State started about having student teachers and so 21 of my 23 years as principal we have a large cadre of student teachers every year. And because my school had some special programs, we did project based learning with the National Science Foundation grant for a number of years. We did a lot of team teaching, multi age teaching, multi age grade configurations and things. Sonoma State liked sending student teachers so we had student teachers, usually eight to ten student teachers a semester, but we also had students from all the departments come to do volunteering. People like to come to Monta Vista because it was walkable from Sonoma State. And I had to cut the numbers off at 75 every semester because we couldn't accommodate that. So it was a great relationship. And you know, we grew for many years and we worked on some grant applications together and things like that. But when I retired Sonoma State asked me, "would you like to come and work supervising student teachers who are getting ready for the program", so it's like, the people like we're in my school student teaching, I wasn't supervising them, but I actively integrated them into our school and teaching. And so that's what I've been doing for the last 10 years is continuing to work for Sonoma State and the school systems with Petaluma and Cotati Rohnert Park and I also work with all the supervisors on some of the things. So Sonoma State certainly reaches out to local communities to placed in teachers Jane : 47:35 So there's been a long relationship and actually Sonoma State has right now for the Multiple Subject program, which is the elementary program, the K-8 teaching credential. We have, how many schools do we have right now? I think there are four elementary schools sometimes there's been more that have student teachers in Rohnert Park, and the same as in Petaluma, some in Santa Rosa. So right now, the school I work in is Penngrove which is part of the public schools, but I also worked in Evergreen here for a while. So it's a close relationship with student teaching and becoming a teacher. Megan : 48:52 I was going to ask you this earlier. I do have the question written down right now, but It was before I knew that you wanted to be a teacher at such a young age. I wanted to ask you what made you want to become an educator in the first place? Jane : 49:46 You know, I grew up in a family where my mom she didn't always work, but she was a teacher. It was always expected in my family that we would go to college. I loved kids so I think I always felt like I was going to be a teacher. When I was a teenager and I said there wasn't a ton to do and Rohnert Park, one thing I did one summer, just remember this, is I invited a bunch of the little kids just on our street to come and we played school. I was probably about 15 and we read stories and we did drawings and we did you know fun little things and they were like six, seven and eight years old. They were kids, I babysat but we played school basically. And I really loved that and you know, it just always, I always wanted to do something that I hoped would make our society better. And so I grew up with that kind of a family belief. And so being a teacher was a way to hopefully influence students to be good, civic minded, collaborative, contributing members of society. And that's been my philosophy as an educator forever. What what are we doing, not just learning facts and materials and you know how to do need to learn how to read and math, but how to converse about learning how to converse about issues in our world and things like that. So I don't know exactly. It just was that's what I wanted to do. And I actually had a job one year where it was very enlightening to me, but I worked for the post office, not delivering mail but sorting mail and stuff like that. And I worked for a postal inspector too. And I met a whole bunch of different kinds of people and I'd ever been around just an interesting group of people. But it just reinforced that while this was interesting, I really wanted to be interacting with kids. And then I decided to become a principal because I wanted to do the whole thing. The adults and the kids and helping make the system work as best it could. So that's why. Megan : 55:15 I have a Question here regarding the pandemic and how that affected your career, and your experience in the educational field? Jane : 56:51 Well it's interesting that you asked that. So obviously, we went to all online teaching like one day we were in schools working and on the next Monday we were online and everybody had to learn, including student teachers that I was working with. So when we first went to online teaching It was in March of the 2020. I guess it was good years. And, you know, it was a learning curve for every buddy. And I'm gonna have to say that I had been in education, at that point, Because I've been actually an education for 52 years, but 50 years at that point, it was my 50th anniversary in education, I felt like a first year teacher having to learn how to teach in a whole different way. Granted, I was teaching adults, you know, who are in student teaching, and for teachers too and I found in my role as a site supervisor, well two things as a site supervisor, not just with my student teachers, but working with the mentor teachers, because they were all worried are we going to be able to do enough for our teacher, I said, we're all learning this together. So I felt like I was supporting a bigger, much bigger group. More regularly. And I talked a lot to principals I mean, principals talk to me because I was a principal for a long time. So everybody was in a beginning learning with the pandemic. And you mentioned in your question, a lot of people retired and quit but a lot did not. Because then we went for a whole nother year online, basically, teaching and people got better at it. For student teachers, the challenge was they got to be really good at planning curriculum, and being very focused and how to keep kids going as best they could. And it wasn't ideal. Don't I'm not saying that it was there's lots of gaps that happened here. But what they got they did, they missed out on experience with how to manage a group of kids in a classroom, which is equally important part of teaching. There are teachers I know that chose to retire, but not as many in the area that I know of, as, as we hear about, I think a number of teachers decided to retire, who were close to retirement and just felt that it had been really draining and they just weren't ready to take it on again. And frankly when we came out of the pandemic, digital online only, what I saw happen last year, not this year, so much we started out because there were still, there were massive mandates parents weren't allowed on the school campus. Yet because there was still a raging pandemic going, you know, to a degree. And so there was tensions that happened in the schools. A number of schools that I saw and parents that usually were very supportive were really agitated because they couldn't come on campus. And that kind of thing. But what else the schools opened up more and more and they could let people come on the campus and everything else. Masks were still mandated at that point, but the tensions dissipated a lot. And so my mentor teachers, the classroom teachers that the student teachers were working with, had thought when they came back in person that would be just like when they left and they realized that it wasn't. As I talked to them now this year is they're back in process. They feel, the ones that are still there, are feeling what we learned from being online was how to be really focused and and make sure we used our time really wisely and cover areas, because kids lost things, lost ground because it wasn't quite the same kind of learning. And people are feeling there's a, what I'm going to call a new normalcy coming back, different teaching some different teaching strategies that they learn work well in person to and feeling more positive about what can come and really working hard with kids that have never been in school. So for example, not here, but I have a student teacher in Merced. Who has students in school, she's teaching kindergarten. Jane : 1:01:32 These kids, none of her kindergarteners ever went to preschool because they were the age during the pandemic. So that has required her as a beginning teacher to change her whole approach because usually, you get kids in school that have been with other kids as a group, so there's been changes. Megan : 1:02:25 Would you say that Rohnert Park stands apart from other small towns with similar backgrounds or would it be comparable? Jane : 1:02:33 I don't really consider Rohnert Park particularly a small town but more a medium community. I would say that California has a lot more communities like Rohnert Park that developed around the same time I'm thinking of if you go out to like Walnut Creek, this is the East Bay, Walnut Creek Pleasant Hill, in that area they have lots of big developments similar to this that are part of those communities. So I think every town has its unique culture and focus. But I don't even know what else I would say right around here would be the same. Petaluma certainly has grown. But Petaluma still has that old part of the west side of Petaluma that's probably more like where you grew up originally because it was very agricultural limited. So I don't know that I can answer that very accurately. Megan : 1:03:46 I have another question here. How does it feel to be working directly with student teachers at SSU and helping create new generations of teachers? Jane : 1:03:53 I love it, obviously. I mean, I retired after 42 years in public education. And when that's done, the state asked me if I wanted to come here. I said, of course I'll come and I've been doing it for ten years which I think attests to the fact that I love turning the teachers. I always have liked working with kids and teaching kids, but I love working with adults. My master's was in school leadership and adults but I always wanted to be at a school site, where I could see how kids and adults interact and make the differences I talked about building collaborative, responsible students, you know, and working with teachers. So Sonoma State, the multiple subject credential program is a little different than a lot of the other CSU systems that are really, really big. This is a smaller one and smaller program and I don't know that I want to work in the other programs as much as this because as a supervisor, I work at a site, but I also work with the people that teach the classes to the students to teachers. And I make sure that we're taking what they're learning in their classes and applying that knowledge and understanding as they learn to be teachers. And I do think I bring my background of having been a school administrator and teacher or hired a lot of teachers understanding what are good beginning skills to go into the teaching profession and what so as long as I can continue to do that I hope to. Jane : 1:06:41 It's been interesting. Thank you for inviting me. Megan : 1:06:45 Thank you for coming. It was great talking to you and meeting you.