Nile Garden School for decades was a country school.

It’s enrollment consisted almost entirely of students from farm families or those that resided in the rural area south of Manteca.

That continued to be the case a number of years after Nile Garden and other single school elementary districts merged with the Manteca Elementary School District and Manteca Union High School District in 1965 to create Manteca Unified.

That started to change in the early 1990s when the building of the Mission Ridge neighborhood west of Walmart generated more students than nearby Sequoia Elementary could handle.

Today, the scales have tipped in the other direction.

The vast majority of the campus is populated by “city kids.”

And the City of Manteca is growing even closer.

Today, Nile Garden has an enrollment of 1,147.

The Measure A school bond project now underway that is replacing portable classrooms with permanent classrooms plus reconfigurations being made will allow an enrollment of 1,200.

Several of the portables will be repurposed for the after-school community-based Give Every Child a Chance tutoring and related programs.

Nile Garden could get larger.

The school district expects to break ground next year on two new elementary campuses south of the 120 Bypass. One will be on Tinnin Road and the other northwest of Woodward and McKinley avenues.

The campus could have an annex to accommodate 400 additional students.

It’s a planning move designed to make sure when capacity is reached at the two new schools being built and growth starts occurring to the southeast that the district has an option besides adding portable classrooms to existing campuses.

The annex would be built on 8 acres Manteca Unified bought adjoining the campus last year.

The purchase will allow the construction of a driveway to Union Road later this year to ease congestion in the school parking lot and along Nile Avenue.

The additional land will also accommodate more playing fields for the school.

Nile Garden, thanks to the $159 million Measure G bond passed in 2014 along with state matching funds, is essentially an all new campus.

In recent years a dedicated transitional kindergarten/kindergarten complex was added, a new multipurpose room built, a new administrative office constructed, paging and fire alarm systems modernized, the campus secured, playground issues addressed, a dedicated parking lot created, and a school bus drop zone installed plus more.

To contact Dennis Wyatt, email dwyatt@mantecabulletin.com