Growth south of the 120 Bypass as well as along the Airport Way corridor will mean high school attendance boundary shifts.

The initial proposal the Manteca Unified School District board will vet involves:

*Shifting Diamond Oaks neighborhood east of Highway 99 and north of Louise Avenue from the Manteca High attendance area to the East Union High attendance area.

*Shifting the Mayors Park neighborhood in the triangle bounded by Louise Avenue, Union Road, and the Union Pacific Railroad tracks from the Sierra High attendance area to the East Union High attendance area.

*Moving the 760-home Villa Ticino neighborhood under construction on the southwest corner of Airport Way and Louise Avenue just south of the district office from the Sierra High attendance area to East Union High.

The proposed adjustments that will first undergo community feedback before being put to a board vote, are in response to trends in the three high school attendance areas.

The impact of the ultimate attendance shift will be minimalized by a number of factors.

*A number of Diamond Oaks students are already attending East Union High via the open enrollment process.

*There are no students currently living in the Villa Ticino project.

*District policy allows eighth graders and up to be grandfathered to attend their current schools if attendance boundaries are switched.

*Open enrollment could allow students seventh grade and below to attend the school they would go to now if they were in high school thanks to modernization efforts at East Union and Manteca coupled with community facilities district funds that allowed for additional classroom space.

Last May, Manteca High had 1,864 students, Sierra High 1,630, and East Union 1,641.

Both Manteca and Sierra are up this school year while East Union is down in student numbers.

The fastest growing area now in the city is the southwest quadrant where more than 2,000 homes in various subdivisions in the Sierra High attendance are either under construction or site work is  in the process of moving forward.

All of those homes won’t be built in a year and sold. That said, developers have been positioning themselves to meet market demand.

Griffin Park, a 1,301-home neighborhood, is underway along South Main Street in the Manteca High attendance area. There are more than 1,100 homes left to be built.

East Union, by contrast, in its attendance area has only one active neighborhood project being built — the North Main Commons — that is winding down to its final homes.

A fairly new trend is also behind the need to shift attendance boundaries — high interest rates and strong housing prices.

When those two are coupled to the fact a majority of people with mortgages have rates 4 percent or below — almost half the current rate of a new mortgage — it is creating a situation where people who would normally sell to either upsize or downsize are staying put due to the price of borrowing.

That means Manteca Unified is now dealing with declining enrollment in a number of neighborhoods as students “age out” of the school system.

 At the same time, between 600 and 700 housing units are being added to Manteca each year

That includes mostly detached homes but there are a fairly strong number of apartments and duplexes being built as well.

Shifting attendance boundaries allows the district to make use of underutilized space at some campuses and avoid overflowing at others.

In doing so, it assures the best overall educational programming in all schools districtwide as well as making  efficient use of facility dollars.

To contact Dennis Wyatt, email dwyatt@mantecabulletin.com