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.

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