Tara is the name author Margaret Mitchell gave the fictional home of Scarlett O’Hara in her 1936 novel “Gone With the Wind.”
It is also the name developers bestowed on a proposed high tech business site in southwest Manteca that ended up being fiction and not a reality.
The envisioned business park once touted as the valley’s answer to Pleasanton’s Hacienda Business Park is why the Manteca Unified School District attached the name “Tara” to 17 acres set aside for a possible elementary school in the same area.
For months, those buying homes that sell for north of $700,000 with more than a few surpassing $900,000 in Manteca’s current ground zero for growth southwest of Airport Way and the 120 Bypass, have lobbied hard to get the school built.
They’ve appeared before repeated Manteca Unified School District meetings.
They’ve even spoke before City Council meetings although the city has little to say in the matter.
Their points often consist of noting:
*The district in decades old documents indicated the school is needed based on projected growth.
*The school site has appeared on numerous maps just like the business park appeared on many maps.
*Manteca Unified owns the land.
*Many students are being bused elsewhere or pushing the outer limits of walking based on district no-bus zones of 1.25 miles for K-8 and 2.5 miles for high school students.
*They are paying Mello-Roos taxes for school facilities; therefore, the district has the money to build new schools.
None of those points — except the last regarding adequate funding to build a new campus — are off-the-mark.
However, realties change.
The site was selected before the state mandated 200-year flood protection.
And while new homes in the area are being assessed to provide such protection for the school site as well as the homes, it underscores how development patterns are modified and changed to reflect what is happening as opposed to what was expected to happen.
The district has three school sites in the area obtained roughly 20 years ago.
They are the 56-acre Tinnin Road site and two sites penciled in for elementary schools, Rustic and Tara.
The district also had two sites planned for annex elementary campuses, 9 acres in north Manteca in the Union Ranch neighborhood and 10 acres in south Manteca in the Tesoro neighborhood.
Both were once projected as necessary based on growth plans and student household yields derived from social-economic patterns of families buying new homes a generation plus ago.
In each case, the actual growth didn’t justify the need for the annex schools. The land was sold to build more houses.
Part of the calculation to determine whether it made sense to keep the sites and build annex elementary campuses was forged during the Great Recession with the new realities of state funding ongoing education programs in growing districts along with the dearth of state school bond money to help pay for new schools.
The district was also faced with the need to modernize an aging collection of nearly 30 schools while at the same time dealing with enrollment growth of having two of the state’s consistently fastest growing cities — Lathrop and Manteca — within its boundaries.
In order to maximize all resources — local bond money that was restricted to upgrading existing campuses and new schools facility funds from growth fees, community facility districts, and the elusive third leg of state bond funds — a new “ideal” maximum standard was set for district school sizes.
The school board’s perimeter was simple: They wanted to assure the best possible education environment to lay for foundation for students while maximizing money spent on facilities and ongoing funding for staffing and support operations.
The result was upping the maximum ideal size of an elementary school from 800 to 1,100 students and high schools from 1,750 to 2,200 students.
They rejected higher numbers such as 3,000 for high schools because they were too unwieldy and would create an impersonal environment.
They dialed in on 2,200 for high schools as it would allow the optimum amount of educational program offerings without being too large.
Smaller campuses simply didn’t pencil out and represent a significant ongoing financial drain for support services.
In other words, there was economies in scale for daily operations critical for long range district financial stability.
And that stability was critical to provide stable classroom learning environments protected as much as possible from the potential of layoffs and such.
The district is
building new
school capacity
The district is now funding $260 million worth of upgrades at existing campuses through Measure A bonds voters approved in 2020.
It was designed to tackle some of the identified $650 million in needed upgrades due to normal wear and tear plus aging as well as address deficiencies such as gyms and other support facilities that had become woefully inadequate.
The first projects are at Manteca High and East Union high schools, campuses that are respectively 104 years and 58 years in age
By wedding bond money for upgrades, residue redevelopment agency funds, CFD revenue and growth fees, the district is essentially “building” a fourth high school within the Manteca city limits.
It is being done by taking the three existing City of Manteca campuses — Sierra, East Union, and Manteca — to the point they can accommodate educational programs for 2,200 students.
To understand why that is a big deal, a new campus for 800 students being built in River Islands at Lathrop has a new price tag approaching $180 million.
Elementary schools, from scratch, can cost as much as $60 million based on a campus completed recently in a school district south of Tracy.
Several year ago, the state mandated full-day transitional kindergarten by 2025.
It is also a goal of the state to half full-day kindergarten sessions in place as well.
The Tinnin Road site has been tapped for an early education center that will combine TK along with kindergarten classes currently conducted at Nile Garden Veritas and Woodward School.
TK and kindergarten classes have similar classroom space requirements.
It is also substantially less expensive to build “X” number of classrooms and support facilities at one location than a bunch of smaller projects at various campuses.
The early education center means existing kindergarten space at Veritas, Nile Garden, and Woodward can be repurposed for first through eighth grade use.
In doing so, it re-enforces the neighborhood school concept by creating more classroom space closer to where students reside to reduce the need to bus overflow students to schools elsewhere.
The Tinnin site offers maximum flexibility now — and even 10 years down the road — because it is 60 acres.
By using two-story buildings, Manteca Unified has a number of options including creating a cluster campus for TK through 12th grades.
Development drawback
to Tara & the fallacy of
CFD school funding
The city has put a high density residential zoning adjacent to the Tara site.
Spanos Co. plans to build a four-story apartment complex overlooking the school site on that land.
That has raised concerns about school site security.
The other issue is how CFD financing works.
The per household assessment over 30 years covers roughly less than a third of the cost to build facilities to educate students generated from homes.
The district also can’t issue bonds until there is an adequate reserve established.
In the best case scenarios Manteca Unified had when growth took off between 1980 and 1991 at a much faster pace than it is today, it took 10 years for the collection of adequate funds to leverage a bond issuance.
If the district took that route, it would be 10 to 15 years before a new elementary school could be built.
Meanwhile, the southwest portion of Manteca at the current pace would have built the majority of the upwards of 4,000 housing units envisioned for the area.
And for 15 years, there would have been little, if any, school capacity added.
That would mean solutions such as double session and year round school would likely be the only viable options until then.
To contact Dennis Wyatt, email dwyatt@manteabulletin.com
