Edmond Public Schools

Eighteen years before Oklahoma

On September 16, 1889, a class sat down in a one-room schoolhouse in Edmond. It was the first public schoolhouse in what would become Oklahoma, and the state it belonged to would not exist for another eighteen years. The building was paid for by the Ladies School Aid Society, led by Jennie Forster, in the same year the Land Run filled the territory with people who had barely unpacked. Settlers had arrived in Edmond on April 22. Less than five months later they had a school.

That is where Edmond Public Schools starts, in a room that predates the state it now operates under. Most school districts can point to a founding date. This one can point to the day the first class sat down, and to the woman whose group raised the money.

The schoolhouse did not last as a school. Within a decade the district had outgrown it and sold it. A town that put a school up in its first year had already run out of room in that school before the century turned. It has been running out of room ever since.

Three names on three high schools

Edmond Memorial High School is the oldest of them. It was founded in 1917 as Edmond High School, and its first graduating class, in 1922, was twenty-four students. In 1975 it was renamed Memorial, in memory of alumni lost in Vietnam.

Edmond North and Edmond Santa Fe both opened in 1993. The single high school of 1917 became three in the 1990s, and Edmond has carried those three names ever since.

There is a fourth coming. The district has purchased land east of the interstate at Air Depot and Covell for a planned high school. No opening date has been set, and I am not going to guess at one.

A district that keeps adding rooms

Edmond Public Schools runs 31 schools today. Twenty elementary schools, six middle schools and three high schools make up the core of it, all of them answering to one board.

The elementaries are too many to list usefully, and the list keeps changing anyway. The newest two, Redbud and Scissortail, both opened in 2022.

The middle schools are Central, Cheyenne, Cimarron, Heartland, Sequoyah and Summit. A seventh opens in 2028. Its name is not public yet.

In October 2020 the district counted 23,496 students. Today it is somewhere past twenty-three thousand, and official figures disagree with each other enough that around twenty-four thousand is as precise as anyone should get.

Put those pieces side by side and the pattern is the same one the 1889 schoolhouse started. Two elementaries in 2022. A middle school in 2028. Land bought for a high school with no date on it yet. The district that began in one room has never once stopped adding rooms, and nothing in its current plans suggests it is about to.

Bigger than the town on its name

The district carries Edmond's name, and it does not stop at Edmond's edges. Within Oklahoma County it covers most of Edmond, most of Arcadia and portions of Oklahoma City, and it reaches north into Logan County, which means a house can sit in a different county from the high school it feeds.

Arcadia is its own small town with its own city government, and most of it still sends its kids to Edmond schools. The Oklahoma City piece is the one people miss. Thousands of far-north addresses in Oklahoma City are Edmond Public Schools addresses. A family can buy inside Oklahoma City limits, pay Oklahoma City for city services and send their kids to an Edmond school. The mailing address on the listing does not settle which district a house is in, in either direction.

Out at the far northwest edge, the district's territory meets Deer Creek's. Two districts with different histories and different buildings sit side by side out there, and a house near that seam can belong to either one. Nothing on a listing sheet will reliably tell you which.

So I treat the district as a question with exactly one reliable source. Which school serves a specific address is answered by the district office, and I make that call early on any house where the district is part of why we are looking.

The room that is still standing

The one-room schoolhouse that started all of this was sold off within a decade of that first class. About a century later it was restored, and the work was completed in 2007. The building still stands in Edmond, and it is still a single room, which is easy to forget standing in the parking lot of any of the thirty-one schools that came after it.

Thirty-one schools, a seventh middle school on the way and land waiting for a fourth high school all trace back to that one room, and to a group of women who raised the money for it before Oklahoma was a state.