A School Built to Last Generations.

The story of Will Rogers begins on August 28, 1936, when the Tulsa Board of Education purchased nearly 27 acres in the heart of north Tulsa, land that would soon hold one of Oklahoma’s most architecturally significant public schools.

Construction began on October 11, 1937, entrusted to architects Leon B. Senter and Joseph R. Koberling, Jr. Over the next two years, workers shaped buff brick, terracotta, and terrazzo into a building that combined the bold geometry of the Art Deco movement with the civic dignity befitting a flagship public school, including 9,892 individual pieces of terracotta in the main corridor alone.

The doors opened on September 11, 1939, to 1,501 students, sixty years after Will Rogers’ own birth. Students walked into soaring hallways lined with fifty sepia-toned prints tracing his life, beneath ornamental plasterwork, into a 1,500-seat auditorium with a curved, fluted stage finished in terracotta red, brass, and gold leaf. This was not merely a functional building. It was a declaration, made in the middle of the Great Depression, that Tulsa believed in its children even when times were hard.

An eight-classroom addition followed in 1948, and in 2007, through an effort led by Betty Brown Trinka, Class of ’55, later a director of the Will Rogers High School Community Foundation, Will Rogers was added to the National Register of Historic Places.

Named for the Cherokee-American humorist, actor, and social commentator Will Rogers, the school has carried his spirit of wit, wisdom, and community into every generation that’s passed through it. Since the 2011 Tulsa Public Schools consolidation, Will Rogers has served as a lottery magnet school with courses offered through Tulsa Community College, drawing students from across the city who choose to be Ropers.