It will cost $6.5 million to replace the Manteca High swimming pool that is being demolished this summer to make room for a new gym capable of seating upwards of 2,200 students — the targeted capacity after the 99-year-old campus is reconfigured for growth.
Manteca Unified School District Superintendent Clark Burke noted how the replacement pool will be funded and where it will be located has yet to be determined. A pool has not been included in the scope of $40 million worth of modernization and growth-related work that will get underway in the coming months.
In the meanwhile the district hopes to be able to use the City of Manteca’s Lincoln Pool that is next door to the Manteca High campus for physical education classes. The city and school district have a long history of sharing facilities via a quid pro quo agreement. The school will also make use of the Sierra High swimming pool for its swim team.
While there is no state mandate that the school district have a swimming pool the Manteca Unified board on several occasions has gone on record favoring “equity” between the district’s five comprehensive high schools — Manteca, East Union, Sierra, Lathrop, and Weston Ranch — in terms of offerings.
City and school representatives have had some informal discussions as to where the new swimming pool could be built.
The best possible location for the school as well as the community is for the school district to replace the Lincoln Pool that is approaching 60 years of age at Lincoln Park.
To do so would involve the transfer of land in one form or another.
One possibility floated was the city pursuing an aquatics center on the district’s site for a fourth comprehensive high school within the Manteca city limits on acreage MUSD owns along Tinnin Road. That would allow the future high school to make use of the aquatics center allowing the district to avoid a future construction cost.
At the same time a replacement swimming pool for Manteca High where Lincoln Pool is located could be made available for city use during the summer given it is directly accessible from Powers Avenue. That would give Manteca essentially two community swimming pools since city use and school use do not overlap.
A pool the size Manteca High needs can be built on the Lincoln Pool site without infringing on the lighted baseball field currently used by community baseball teams as well as Manteca High junior varsity baseball.
Aaron Bowers, who oversees facilities for Manteca Unified, said the pool would also not encroach on nearby Lincoln Elementary School fields that serve as the home of Manteca Little League.
The city has made it possible for the district to build a new gym at the Manteca High by abandoning a section of Garfield Avenue that slices through the campus.
The eastern wall of the gym likely will extend to what is the current center of Garfield Avenue as the water, sewer, and storm drain lines that cannot have a structure placed over them are under the eastern side of the street.
Manteca High is the only high school campus where the entire student body cannot be accommodated in the gym at one time for a school assembly. The campus, that now has over 1,600 students, has to have back-to-back school assemblies splitting the student body in two.
To contact Dennis Wyatt, email dwyatt@mantecabulletin.com
