Six Manteca Unified elementary schools are in declining enrollment or are significantly below program capacity.

And that includes five in Manteca — Golden West, Shasta, George McParland, Joshua Cowell, and Stella Brockman.

The sixth is Great Valley in Weston Ranch.

All six are at roughly 60 percent capacity.

That might strike some as incredulous given the district’s strong growth rate and the fact it has surpassed 25,000 students.

The district, though, is spread over 111.3 square miles and includes all of Manteca as well as Lathrop east of the San Joaquin River and southwest Stockton.

Manteca Unified wants to avoid closing schools in the future as it works to try and figure ways to house more students especially in the rapidly growing southwest portion of the city.

It is why what some believe is a cut and dry solution of building an elementary school where the growth is today may not necessarily be the best solution.

The district is already stretching its available funds for new facilities by investing in existing campuses instead of putting all of its proverbial eggs into one new $60 million elementary campus.

And such an elementary campus in southwest Manteca may not be the best location to effectively serve the most students as growth unfolds and neighborhood demographics shift to avoid the need to eventually close a campus.

Throughout California and the rest of the nation school districts are struggling with the need to close schools.

And it’s not necessarily because school districts are losing enrollment.

There are high growth districts struggling to keep schools open that aren’t near where growth is occuring.

The non-profit Education Resource Strategies organization notes when schools get below a certain size threshold, they start facing unique challenges that make it hard to deliver a high-quality education.

Those challenges include increasing costs to educate an average student while at the same time programming tends to shrink.

A classic example of a high growth district building schools at the same time they were closing them was the San Juan Unified School District in Sacramento County in the 1980s and 1990s.

The western end of the district that included part of the City of Sacramento was in declining enrollment with aging neighborhoods while the western end that reached almost to Folsom were in a high growth mode.

The biggest difference between then and now is the limited amount of funds the state is currently making available for new school construction.

It is why Manteca Unified is very mindful of bubbles in terms of student growth.

It also has been closely monitoring housing trends — in terms of aging families, households that may have multiple families, and other nuances such as those who no longer have school-age children at home who aren’t moving to downsize because they don’t want to pay higher mortgage rates.

And there is not a one-size-fits-all model you can arbitrarily apply.

After the turn of the century, conventional wisdom meant Shasta School being in an aging neighborhood would have lost enrollment. But it gained significantly as Bay Area buyers flocked to the neighborhood.

That said, it wasn’t the case in other neighborhoods.

That is what prompted Manteca Unified to put in place a “boots on the ground approach” to actually track new household occupants working with sales agents at new developments instead of relying on an average yield factor per household.

In the case of the five elementary schools in Manteca at roughly 60 percent capacity, new housing projects underway on the Airport Way corridor just south of Louise Avenue and the 797-home Yosemite Square project on Austin Road in east Manteca now under construction could fill many of those available classroom seats.

To make it the work with the least amount of busing, it would likely require school attendance boundary shifts.

To contact Dennis Wyatt, email dwuatt@mantecabulletin.com