In a year from now Manteca High will no longer have to split schoolwide assemblies into three sessions due to limited capacity of the Winter Gym.

That’s because the current modernization project at the 101 year-old campus is targeted for completion next August.

And when it is done the campus will have a gym large enough to hold all of its current student body of roughly 1,700 students and an updated design capacity of 2,200.

The current $41 million project also includes a new swimming pool, new classrooms, new parking lot, a student plaza/promenade and upgrades of some existing facilities.

In October a conceptual design for additional work at Manteca High and East Union High being funded with the $260 million Measure A bond voters approved in November will be presented to the board.

That will address what additional work will be done to modernize the campus as well as provide facilities needed to be matched with program objectives.

It will allow significant upgrades to possibly happen such as on-campus career technical education.

The conceptual plan being presented to the board was the result of the core planning team at each school consisting of faculty, administrators, and the community meeting several times last school year to continue the master planning discussion for each campus.

Ideally when work at the 51-year-old East Union campus as well as Manteca High is completed, the existing facilities will be left in a structural condition to serve students for the next 50 plus years,

The $41 million worth of work now underway at Manteca High is using Measure G, development fees, and redevelopment receipts. Measure G is going toward safety and health concerns as voters were promised. The other funding sources are allowing the district to set the stage for the campus to expand to 2,200 students to accommodate growth. That is funding the new large gym and new swimming pool.

Manteca High is also the first of the city’s three high school campuses being expanded to handle enrollment growth in the coming decades. Ultimately Sierra, East Union, and Manteca will have facilities that allow for a program capacity of 2,200 students — roughly 600 to 700 more students than each campus currently have enrolled.

Based on the need to address everything involving classrooms, support facilities, and grounds there is $62 million of work that is needed at Manteca High that the current project underway was unable to address due to lack of funding. In addition there has been $40 million worth of work identified that is attached to educational programming needed to bring classrooms and other learning spaces up to 21st century scholastics needs.

To contact Dennis Wyatt, email dyatt@mantecabulletin.com