Ponca City Schools Plan for the Next 15 Years

By October, Friday nights are filled with Wildcat football, bands, cheerleaders, hi-steppers, and familiar friends in the stands. Homecoming brings Wildcat alumni back home, fall break gives students and staff a chance to recharge, and Halloween is just around the corner. Elementary hallways will soon be filled with pumpkins, costumes, classroom parties, and the kind of excitement that only kids can bring to October.

 That means we are officially in the groove at Ponca City Public Schools.

 While students and teachers are busy with the daily work of school, there is also important work happening quietly in the background. Over the past several months, Ponca City Public Schools has been engaged in a comprehensive strategic planning process designed to help answer a much bigger question:

 What should our school district look like over the next ten-fifteen years?

 That question matters because Ponca City, like many communities across Oklahoma and the country, is changing. On the first day of school last year, we welcomed 4,395 Wildcats. This year, we welcomed 4,153. Those numbers are not our final enrollment totals, and it would be shortsighted to draw conclusions from only two years of data. However, when we widen the lens, a much clearer trend emerges.

Ten years ago, Ponca City Public Schools enrolled 5,013 students. In 2010, our enrollment was 5,124 students. That means our district today is serving nearly 1,000 fewer students than it did a decade ago.

 We also study something that may seem unrelated to schools at first: live birth data. The most recent data available shows that Kay County recorded 499 live births in 2024. In 2019, there were 524. Ten years ago, there were 620. Those babies become our future Wildcats. The numbers do not tell us everything, but they tell us something important. There are simply fewer school-aged children being born and living in our area than there were in previous generations. Before you say, well my grandbaby was born in Stillwater or Edmond but they live in Ponca city, know that live birth data gets coded to whichever county the address on the birth certificate reads. That has implications not only for Ponca City Public Schools, but for our workforce, businesses, housing, churches, civic organizations, and the long-term future of Ponca City.

 Our Economic Development partners at Ponca City Development Authority (PCDA) have been ringing this bell for a while. Businesses need workforce, and Ponca City needs housing. Thankfully, PCDA's board and the City Commission have stepped up in big ways in the past 24 months to help stop this slide, and we are seeing the rate of new homes going up increase. This is a huge win for our community.  

As a glass half full personality, I want to remember that I am incredibly proud that declining enrollment has not meant declining opportunity in our school district. Over the past 10-15 years, Ponca City Public Schools has worked aggressively to create more opportunities for students and families. We have added Wildcat Academy and virtual school options. We expanded credit recovery through Edgenuity and added summer driver's education. We have grown girls wrestling at the junior high and varsity levels, expanded seventh-grade extracurricular sports opportunities, and added seventh-grade baseball. We have invested heavily in facilities that serve both our students and our community. We expanded internship and career pathway opportunities. We created after-school childcare options for families and employees. The Phillips 66 STEM facility at Ponca City High School has created new opportunities for hands-on learning. Career and technical education options have expanded, including aviation. Our partnership with the Child Development Center has also allowed us to think differently about childcare and early childhood services in our community. We are not done creating opportunities for kids.

 In other words, Ponca City Public Schools of 2026 offers opportunities that simply did not exist here ten or fifteen years ago.

 But growth in programs does not change the demographic reality in front of us. That is exactly why we launched our strategic planning process. Our committee of approximately 30 community stakeholders, consisting of students, teachers, principals, parents, business leaders, and citizens has spent months examining our district, listening to people, studying our data, discussing priorities, and thinking about the future. Their work will conclude this fall. Their recommendations will then be presented to the Ponca City Board of Education for review and consideration. From there, we transition from dreaming to execution.

 Strategic planning is about deciding what matters most and having the discipline to align our people, programs, facilities, finances, and resources around those priorities. We cannot assume the next ten years will look like the last ten years. We will have choices to make. Some may be easy. Others may require thoughtful conversations about facilities, programs, staffing, and how we best serve students with the resources entrusted to us. Those conversations should not frighten us. We have engaged the community with surveys, we have held listening sessions with our groups, we have poured over our data, soon it’ll be time to bring options forward for consideration.

 Ponca City has reinvented itself many times throughout its history. Our community was built by people who were willing to look ahead, take risks, invest in the future, and believe that tomorrow could be better than today. Our schools must be willing to do the same.

As we enjoy Homecoming, football games, fall break, Halloween parties, and everything that makes October such a fun month in our schools, know that we are also thinking seriously about the Wildcats who will walk through our doors five, ten, and twenty years from now.

This is not going to be the Superintendent’s plan, but what our community has tasked us with doing in the future. We will build that future the same way Ponca City has always accomplished its best work: together. Our schools are a direct reflection of our community, we are the community’s largest service organization, and the future of Ponca City and the future of Ponca City Public Schools will always be connected. Myself and our staff take this charge seriously day in and day out. We will do this together, with you and our community supporters.

As I wrap this piece for the month please take a moment to enjoy fall, cheer loudly for the Wildcats, soak up Homecoming, enjoy a little fall break, and get ready for plenty of Halloween excitement.

It is a great time to be a Wildcat.