Putnam City Schools

The district that was here first

Putnam City Schools formed in 1914. Warr Acres did not exist yet. Bethany was a five-year-old Nazarene colony that would not incorporate as a city until 1931. Most of the northwest Oklahoma City this district serves today was open ground.

The neighborhoods on that side of town filled in around a district that was already there. Bethany became a city seventeen years after the district started. The houses that line northwest Oklahoma City now came later still, and the high school dates below show when each stretch of them arrived. For a buyer on the northwest side, that means the school district under a house is very often older than the neighborhood, older than the street and older than the town printed on the mailing address. The district describes itself as the first independent school district in Oklahoma, and its offices sit at 1914 Centennial Parkway in Warr Acres. The street number is the founding year.

Three high schools, three dates on the map

The cleanest way to read the history of the northwest side is to look at when each high school opened. Every one of those dates marks the moment another band of that side of town filled with houses.

Putnam City High School is the original, dating to 1914. Its first graduating class, in 1919, was three students. Three graduates, from a district that would one day send thousands of kids to school every morning. The campus it uses now, on NW 50th, opened in 1958, as the ground around it was turning into neighborhoods.

Putnam City West opened in 1968 to relieve overcrowding as the west side filled in. That date is a marker for the 1960s, when the houses kept going farther out past where anybody had built before.

Putnam City North opened on August 24, 1978, with 750 sophomores and juniors walking in on the first day. There were no seniors that first year. The school grew into its classes and was a full four-year school by 1983. That one marks the north side's turn.

Read together, the three buildings work like rings on a tree. 1914 for the original, 1958 for the campus that still stands on NW 50th, 1968 for the west, 1978 for the north. Anybody trying to understand why a house on one street looks nothing like a house a mile away can start with those four years. When I drive the northwest side with somebody, those dates explain more about what we are looking at than most neighborhood names do.

One stadium and fifty-two languages

Putnam City runs 27 schools by its own count. There are the three high schools, Putnam City Academy as the district's alternative high school program, five middle schools and more than a dozen elementaries spread across the northwest side. The middle schools are Kenneth Cooper, Hefner, James L. Capps, Mayfield and Western Oaks. Around eighteen thousand students attend.

Three high schools, and one Friday night address. All three share the district's main stadium at Putnam City High School, so on any home night the whole district is pointed at the same field off NW 50th.

The district reports that its students speak 52 languages.

The voters have kept approving bond programs here, most recently in 2025. A district that has been here since 1914 still has to ask its voters to pay for its buildings, and the people inside its lines keep saying yes.

Where it reaches

The district serves Warr Acres, Woodlawn Park, most of Bethany and parts of northwest Oklahoma City. Bethany is one of the places where it shares a city with another district, and the Bethany page on this site covers how that works.

The Oklahoma City piece is the part that surprises people. A family can live inside Oklahoma City, pay Oklahoma City for its city services and send their kids to Putnam City schools. The mailing address on a listing does not decide the district, here or anywhere else on the northwest side.

Which school serves a specific house is a question for the district office. I make that call early, on any house where the district is part of the reason we are looking, so the answer is in hand before anyone gets attached.

1914, on the front door

The offices at 1914 Centennial Parkway sit in Warr Acres, a town that did not exist when that year was new. The west side filled, then the north side, and each one left a high school date behind. The address on the district's front door is the one date that came before all of them.