Manteca Unified bought 56 acres on Tinnin Road two decades ago with the intent of building the fourth comprehensive high school campus within Manteca’s city limits.
But that was before demographics started shifting, school construction costs skyrocketed, and the MUSD board did an extensive rethink of the district’s approach to facilities as well as education programming.
That 56-acre site was recently selected for the building of a South Manteca Early Education Center to house kindergarten and transitional kindergarten classes for students south of the 120 Bypass that currently are funneled into Veritas, Woodward, and Nile Garden Schools.
But that doesn’t preclude the district from building another comprehensive high school on the site to join the Sierra, Manteca, and East Union campuses within the City of Manteca to serve secondary education students.
Nor does it eliminate the ability to add an elementary school, a replacement school for the aging and problematic Calla High campus or a combination thereof on the Tinnin Road parcel.
And the decision to build the early education center on the Tinnin site will open up the three elementary schools to accommodate more first through eighth graders from surrounding neighborhoods.
The rethink was based on the determination that the optimum size for education programming for an elementary school is between 1,000 and 1,100 students. For a high school, the size the ideal enrollment board settled on was 2,250 students.
That was based on a number of factors that weighed the ability to offer effective education programs, overhead costs related to support staff and administration, and providing the most optimum educational environment based on leveraging available tax dollars for the classroom and facilities to the maximum possible.
Prior to that, the district generally aimed at having elementary schools at around 800 student and high schools at 1,750.
The district debated the upper end of enrollments and the impacts they would have.
For high schools, for example, the 2,250 number allowed a larger breadth of subject offerings but didn’t start entering the territory of the high school being too big in terms of being able to operate and administer.
Granted, such decisions are subjective to a degree.
That is why it was the result of input from throughout the district from teachers in the classroom to the board representing the community.
As such, it has allowed the district to be fairly nimble at addressing housing needs.
The decision to bump high schools up to 2,250 students, evenly means between the exiting high school campuses at buildout they will be able to absorb an enrollment that essentially would have translated into a new high school of 1,500 students.
That means the district’s capacity will be increased by almost a third with existing campuses.
It required — in the case of Manteca and East Union highs schools — shifting to two-story classrooms.
Given the district was also facing $600 million plus in modernization needs of existing facilities districtwide of which the $260 million Measure A bond will help address, there were opportunities to replace aging, problematic, and already inadequate facilities such as the Manteca High gym. In doing so, it was enlarged to serve an ultimate program enrollment fo 2,250 students.
Education program capacity, by the way, is different than overall capacity as defined as jamming the maximum possible number of students the state will allow into a classroom at any given time.
The larger high school campuses meant not having to build expensive support facilities such as gyms, football stadiums, parking lots and such to accommodate 1,500 more high school students.
Given it is costing $160 million to construct the first phase of the 800-student River Islands High in Lathrop, Manetas’s approach effectively stretched available facility dollars.
The last elementary school built n San Joaquín County south of Tracy came in at $60 million.
MUSD is hoping to address the need for more elementary classroom space as growth occurs by adding “clusters” of four to eight classrooms to existing campuses where it would be a viable option.
Besides being quicker to add classrooms than build an entire new campus, it allows the district to take facility paths that are not likely to backfire.
“The worst thing to do is building an elementary school and then down the road growth patterns shifted,” District Superintendent Clark Burke noted earlier this year.
In some larger districts, that has meant elementary campus closing on one end of a district while campuses were overcrowded on the other end.
The $3.7 million purchase price of the Tinnin Road property also is paying dividends.
Today, if MUSD were to buy 56 aces in the Manteca area based on current land prices it would cost at least $8.4 million.
And unlike the other undeveloped school site the district acquired roughly 20 years ago south of the 120 Bypass — Rustic near the Airport Way corridor — the district has options on the 56-acre site.
And if they were to build a fourth high school with virtually all classrooms in two-story structures, they district could adequately accommodate a secondary education program along with other education needs whether it is early education, another elementary school or a continuation high school campus.
To contact Dennis Wyatt, email dwyatt@mantecabulletin.com
