There is one tool that Manteca Unified might need to deploy in the next five years that may not sit too well with families already living in Manteca and Lathrop — redistricting school attendance boundaries.
Over the next five years conservative projections show there will be 1,327 additional students pushing the overall district enrollment past 25,000 students. Of those, 377 are expected to be added at the high school level and 950 in transitional kindergarten through eighth grade. That is enough growth to fill a typical Manteca Unified elementary campus of 1,000 students.
As it stands today:
*Lathrop School is 112 students over capacity with an enrollment of 933.
*Mossdale School is 42 students over capacity with an enrollment of 1,032.
*Sequoia School, Joseph Widmer School, and George Komure School are all with 10 percent of capacity.
But enrollment today isn’t the driving factor guiding student housing decisions. It is the historic student yield of specific housing types that have been built in the past five years within the district that show what school officials can expect a newly constructed housing unit to generate in enrollment growth.
A single family home on average will generate 0.489 students, a multiple family attached home 0.680 students, and an apartment unit 0.717 students. The data the district is equipping itself with breaks it down by general grade levels— kindergarten through sixth grade, seventh and eighth grades, and high school — for each of the housing types.
When combined with the housing projects actually breaking ground or in the final phases of approval for construction, it points to Veritas School and Mossdale School as being the first elementary campuses to be overrun with growth in their attendance areas.
If attendance areas are left intact, Veritas with a capacity of 860 will have 1,362 students by 2021. Mossdale with a capacity of 990 will have 1,351 students by 2021. The only other attendance area expected to be out of wrack by 2021 that will have 110 more students in its attendance area than the campus has capacity to absorb.
The tools Manteca Unified has to deal with growth are redistricting, continuing the policy of overflowing newly enrolled students from attendance areas that are at impact to ones that are not, adding modular classrooms, building new classroom wings, and building new elementary schools.
The district overflows new students when the classes at their grade level are at capacity. That means a new family with a first grader and a fifth grader in moving into an attendance area of a school where the first grade is impacted but the fifth grade is not would have the option of splitting the students or sending them to the nearest school that has space at both grade levels.
Given even of the district had the money to build two elementary schools and started the process needed to gain approval and to build them today, families moving into new homes in both the Veritas and Mossdale school attendance areas will have their elementary students bused out of their area to attend school.
