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Bixby Grew 41% While Tulsa Lost a Fifth of Its Students

Wed, 28 Jan 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Bixby^↗ added 2,486 students over the last decade. Tulsa^↗ Public Schools, 15 miles north, lost 8,417 in the same period. The two districts share a metro area, a labor market, and an interstate corridor. Their enrollment lines are going in opposite directions.

Since 2015-16, Tulsa has lost 20.6% of its enrollment, falling from 40,867 to 32,450 students. That decline was not absorbed by the state at large. It migrated south and east, into the ring of newer, wealthier suburbs that surrounds the city. Bixby grew 41.1%. Collinsville^↗ grew 19.5%. Coweta^↗ grew 13.0%. The students moved south and east.

Two rings, two realities

The Tulsa metro splits cleanly into an inner ring of declining districts and an outer ring of growing ones.

The inner ring, which includes Tulsa, Union^↗, Sand Springs^↗, Catoosa^↗, Sapulpa^↗, and several smaller districts, enrolled 78,219 students in 2015-16. By 2025-26, that number had fallen to 66,449, a loss of 11,770 students, or 15.0%.

The outer ring, Broken Arrow^↗, Jenks^↗, Bixby, Owasso^↗, Collinsville, Coweta, and Glenpool^↗, went the other direction: from 54,947 to 60,073, a gain of 5,126 students, or 9.3%.

The metro as a whole still shrank. The outer ring's gains offset only 43% of the inner ring's losses. The remaining 6,644 students left the Tulsa metro entirely, moving to virtual schools, private schools, homeschool, or out of state.

The COVID crater Tulsa never climbed out of

Tulsa was already losing students before 2020. The district shed about 500 per year from 2016-17 through 2019-20, a manageable if persistent bleed. Then the pandemic hit.

In the two school years spanning COVID, 2020-21 and 2021-22, Tulsa lost 5,298 students, 63% of its entire decade-long decline compressed into two years. The brief recovery in 2022-23, when 660 students returned, proved to be an anomaly. Enrollment fell again in 2023-24 and 2024-25 before dropping 1,167 in 2025-26, the largest single-year loss since the pandemic.

The suburbs, by contrast, bounced back quickly. Broken Arrow posted its highest enrollment ever in 2022-23 at 20,115, surpassing its pre-COVID peak within two years. Bixby added 728 students in 2021-22 alone, its largest single-year gain on record. The pandemic did not just shrink Tulsa. It accelerated a suburbanization pattern that was already underway.

Where the pipeline is breaking

Tulsa's losses are not distributed evenly across grades. The youngest grades have been hollowed out. Kindergarten enrollment fell 29.2%, from 3,566 to 2,523. First grade fell 30.0%. Third grade and sixth grade both fell 30.8%.

The only grades that grew were 11th (+12.4%) and 12th (+29.8%), a pattern consistent with extended graduation timelines rather than new enrollment. When upper grades grow while lower grades collapse, a district is watching its future student body shrink in real time.

Bixby's grade distribution tells the opposite story. Every single grade grew, from PK (+41.5%) through 12th (+43.5%), with the largest gains in grades 6, 7, 8, and 11, where enrollment increased by more than 50%. Bixby is not just receiving Tulsa's spillover. It is building a complete K-12 pipeline of its own.

Even the traditional suburbs are slipping

Union, long the second-largest district in the Tulsa metro, lost 1,566 students (-9.8%) over the same period. Sand Springs lost 314 (-6.0%). Catoosa lost 377 (-17.9%). The donut's hole is wider than Tulsa alone.

Owasso, one of the largest outer-ring districts at 9,728 students, gained just 17 over the full decade, effectively flat. Broken Arrow peaked in 2022-23 and has since lost 350 students across three years. Jenks has declined in three consecutive years.

The outer ring's growth is increasingly concentrated in Bixby, Collinsville, and Coweta, smaller districts south and east of Tulsa where new housing development has been extensive. Bixby's rapid residential growth is driven by what the city describes as extensive new housing development.

A familiar pattern, with a twist

The Tulsa donut mirrors what is happening 100 miles southwest. Oklahoma City^↗ has lost 14,473 students (-31.8%) since 2015-16, an even steeper decline than Tulsa's. The OKC metro's outer ring tells the same story: Deer Creek grew 45.1%, Piedmont grew 50.6%, Mustang grew 24.4%.

Tulsa overtook OKC as the state's largest district in 2021-22, but only because OKC was falling faster. By 2025-26, the gap between them had widened to 1,346 students (32,450 vs. 31,104), with both districts on parallel downward paths.

Multiple forces are pulling students from urban cores simultaneously. The Oklahoma Parental Choice Tax Credit, which offers refundable credits of $5,000 to $7,500 per child for private school tuition, approved 37,428 children statewide for the 2025-26 school year, with 3,278 confirmed to have switched from public to private schools. Union Superintendent John Federline has been direct about the impact:

"This ill-advised system has little or no accountability and has siphoned off both students and funding from public schools." — Tulsa World, Jan. 2026

School choice, however, is layered on top of a longer-running suburban migration pattern. Higher interest rates have slowed housing turnover in established neighborhoods while new construction continues in outer suburbs. Federline noted a "relatively cool housing market in the Union district with higher interest rates keeping people in their homes, and there is a declining birth rate in Oklahoma and across the nation."

Immigration enforcement is a third variable. Immigration attorney Lorena Rivas told the Tulsa World about a "drastic increase of people being deported," noting many are parents whose children leave the school system when families are displaced. The enrollment data cannot distinguish between families who moved to Bixby and families who left Oklahoma entirely.

Buildings for sale

The physical consequences of the donut are visible in Tulsa's real estate listings. The district is selling surplus properties, including former elementary schools that closed during 2020 budget cuts. Park Elementary went to Under the Canopy charter school for $350,800. Jones Elementary went to Tulsa Honor Academy for $1 million.

TPS Chief of Strategy Sean Berkstresser explained the rationale: "In the long term, we're worried about the building losing value and the potential for it to create property blight in the neighborhood." Six more properties are currently accepting sealed bids.

The layoffs followed in February 2026: 50 administrative positions cut, with district leaders calling it "the first round" of reductions to prevent a budget cliff driven by falling enrollment and expiring pandemic-era federal funding.

Oklahoma ranks 47th nationally in per-pupil spending, according to the Oklahoma Education Association. When per-student funding is already thin, losing 8,417 students does not just close buildings. It eliminates programs, consolidates routes, and increases class sizes in the buildings that remain open.

What to watch next

Tulsa's share of statewide enrollment has fallen from 5.9% in 2015-16 to 4.7% in 2025-26, a 1.2 percentage point decline that translates to an outsized loss of political and fiscal weight. The kindergarten numbers suggest the trajectory is not finished: with 2,523 kindergarteners in 2025-26 compared to 3,566 a decade ago, the classes entering the pipeline are 29% smaller than the classes exiting it.

Bixby, meanwhile, faces the opposite problem. Growth at 41% over a decade strains capacity. Whether the district can build schools fast enough to absorb the families arriving in its new subdivisions will determine whether the donut's outer ring remains a destination or becomes the next place parents drive past on their way to somewhere newer.

Detailed code that reproduces the analysis and figures in this article is available exclusively to EdTribune subscribers.

Tulsa Is Now Oklahoma's Largest District. Both It and OKC Are at All-Time Lows.

Wed, 14 Jan 2026 12:00:00 GMT

For decades, the question of Oklahoma's largest school district had an obvious answer. Oklahoma City enrolled 45,577 students in 2015-16, nearly 5,000 more than Tulsa. The gap seemed structural, built into the relative size of the two metros.

It is gone. Tulsa^↗ passed Oklahoma City^↗ in 2021-22 with 33,211 students to OKC's 32,086. By 2025-26, the gap has widened to 1,346 students: 32,450 in Tulsa, 31,104 in OKC. Both districts are at the lowest enrollment in the 11-year data window. The title of Oklahoma's largest district now belongs to a school system that has lost more than 8,400 students in a decade.

Two districts, two rates of collapse

Oklahoma City and Tulsa are both shrinking, but at very different speeds. OKC has lost 14,473 students since 2016, a 31.8% decline. Tulsa has lost 8,417, or 20.6%. The difference is not that Tulsa found a way to grow. It is that OKC fell faster.

The divergence is concentrated in two catastrophic years. Between 2019-20 and 2021-22, OKC shed 10,427 students, a 24.5% drop in just two years. Tulsa lost 5,298 over the same period, 13.8%. Those two years account for 72% of OKC's total decline and 63% of Tulsa's.

What happened in 2020-21 and 2021-22? The pandemic pushed families toward virtual options, and Epic Charter Schools^↗ was waiting. Epic's combined enrollment surged from 28,068 in 2019-20 to 59,445 in 2020-21, adding 31,377 students in a single year. OKC, as the state's largest urban district with the highest concentration of families seeking alternatives, bore a disproportionate share of that exodus.

Epic's enrollment has since contracted sharply. Its co-founders, Ben Harris and David Chaney, face felony charges including racketeering and embezzlement. A separate forensic audit commissioned by the Statewide Charter School Board found a $22.9 million budget shortfall resulting from financial mismanagement, though it found no evidence of embezzlement. Epic's enrollment fell to 29,201 by 2025-26, roughly half its peak. But the students who left OKC and Tulsa for Epic largely did not return. OKC recovered just 1,159 students in 2022-23, then resumed losing. Tulsa recovered 660, then flatlined.

The kindergarten signal

The pipeline data is where the long-term prognosis lives. OKC enrolled 4,129 kindergartners in 2015-16. In 2025-26, that number is 2,231, a 46.0% decline. Tulsa's kindergarten class fell from 3,566 to 2,523, a 29.2% drop. Both are severe, but OKC's is closer to a halving.

Pre-K tells a similar story. OKC's PK enrollment dropped from 3,119 to 1,672, down 46.4%. The early grades are the leading indicator: smaller kindergarten classes in 2026 become smaller third-grade classes in 2029 and smaller eighth-grade classes in 2034. The enrollment declines currently visible in upper grades reflect cohorts that entered school when the pipeline was still relatively full. The cohorts now entering are substantially smaller.

Oklahoma's fertility rate dropped 12.2% between 2011 and 2023. The births that produce kindergartners in 2026 happened in 2020 and 2021, at the trough of pandemic-era fertility. The pipeline will not widen soon.

A suburban donut around both cities

The enrollment OKC and Tulsa lost did not vanish from the state. Much of it moved outward. Deer Creek^↗, on OKC's northern edge, grew 45.1% since 2016, adding 2,537 students. Mustang^↗, to the southwest, grew 24.4%. On the Tulsa side, Bixby^↗ grew 41.1%, adding 2,486 students. Jenks^↗ added 700, up 6.0%.

The pattern is a classic suburban donut: urban cores hollowing out while outer-ring districts absorb growth. But the inner suburbs are splitting. Putnam City^↗, which borders OKC, lost 6.4%. Moore^↗ lost 4.9%. On the Tulsa side, Union^↗ lost 9.8%. These are not exurban districts at the metro fringe. They are established, mid-ring suburbs that have historically been stable, now caught in the same current pulling students from the urban core.

The school choice landscape adds another layer. Oklahoma's Parental Choice Tax Credit, launched in December 2023, provides $5,000 to $7,500 per child for private school tuition. According to the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs, 36,860 students were approved for credits in 2025-26, with 2,999 currently enrolled in public school at the time of application. The program is capped at $250 million, and the Oklahoma Tax Commission reported it had awarded $248.5 million by November 2025. The tax credit's cumulative effect on urban districts, which have the highest density of private school alternatives, is not yet separable from the broader decline.

What shrinking means inside the building

The fiscal consequences of enrollment loss are immediate in Oklahoma, where per-pupil funding follows students. As OKCPS Deputy Superintendent Jason Brown told NonDoc in April 2024:

"We've been preparing — and our principals have been preparing — knowing that those ratios would increase year after year — getting us back to normal staffing ratios, and so next year we'll be back to normal, non-ESSER-inflated staffing ratios."

That preparation means larger classes. OKCPS kindergarten sections are rising from 22 to 26 students. Grades 1-2 are going from 22 to 28. Board member Jessica Cifuentes was blunt about the tradeoff:

"They're going to cut more teachers, and not only that, that's going to create more work for the teachers that are already there. That's not sustainable, and it saddens me that our students are going through this." — NonDoc, April 2024

Oklahoma ranks 49th nationally in per-pupil K-12 spending. When enrollment drops and per-pupil funding is already near the bottom, districts have almost no margin to absorb the loss without cutting staff.

A shrinking share of a shrinking state

Together, OKC and Tulsa enrolled 12.5% of all Oklahoma public school students in 2016. In 2026, they account for 9.3%. The state's total enrollment has itself declined, from 703,650 at its 2019-20 peak to 686,718 in 2025-26. But the two largest districts are losing share faster than the state is losing students.

Epic Charter School, at 29,201 students, is now the state's third-largest district, fewer than 2,000 behind OKC. Edmond^↗, at 24,993, is fourth. If OKC's decline continues at its 2025-26 rate, and Epic holds steady, Epic could pass OKC within two years.

The crossover was not a fluke. Tulsa has led OKC for five consecutive years, the gap is widening, and both districts are entering a decade of smaller incoming cohorts. Meanwhile, Epic Charter School sits at 29,201 students, fewer than 2,000 behind OKC. If current trends hold, Epic could pass OKC within two years, and Oklahoma's capital city would be home to the state's third-largest school district.

Detailed code that reproduces the analysis and figures in this article is available exclusively to EdTribune subscribers.