Moving to Tulsa! Public High School (Broken Arrow, Owasso: apartment complex, safe neighborhood, magnet school)

[justine098]

Which is a good Public High School? I heard about Union and Jenks and i would like to know apartments in those districts which are in a safe neighborhood.

[flyingcat2k]

I think it is relative depending on the needs of the student.

Jenks, year in and out, is usually the better public district in the Tulsa area. That stated, it is a huge school with class sizes of about 900 students each year. They do have a lot of students that excel academically but, IMHO, they take a back seat to the athletic department.

Tulsa Public has a number of different HS ranging from Hale and East Central with lots of inner city problems to Booker T. Washington which is the only HS in the state that makes it perennially on the lists of "Best HS's in the Country by some media outlet". Booker T. is largely a magnet school and tough to get into. People knock TPS but Edison, another magnet school, and Booker T. do produce good students. Athletics seem, to me at least, to be not as important as at other schools in the area.

Owasso is another district that excels academically and usually does better on the state exams than Union or Broken Arrow. I don't have much personal experience with the schools there though.

Sand Springs tends to get overlooked but my wife had good experiences there. The test scores are lower than Owasso or BA but the school is smaller. The athletic department does run the school here as every sport seems to have its own building.

Union is similar to Jenks in that it is largely run for the athletic department and used to be decent in academics but was exposed for under-reporting poor performing students. Union's district is also growing in inner city issues as there is a growing poverty belt along US 169 from 21st to 31st. Union, IMHO, is not dealing with this and my personal experience with them was poor. My step-daughter is still behind in math and english from having a poor 4th grade teacher. Not HS but I believe it to be a symptom of the administration there not keeping tabs on what is going on in the district.

Broken Arrow, IMHO, is overrated. The HS is very large with class sizes of about 1,200 students per year. The school is this size basically because BA refuses to split up the HS into more reasonable class sizes. Unless your kid is a standout foo'ball player, musician or academic, they can get lost in the shuffle here. I haven't found the academics to be better than Union and the classes are larger. What is the advantage? Marching Band going to the Rose Bowl every 4 years?!? They do have better test scores than Union but have a larger sample size too.

Just my 2 cents.

As far as apartments go, in Union district stay away from apartments off of 169 north of 71st Street. Those are getting filled with trash. The apartment complex where my wife lived just got busted for having a prostitute run her business out of her apartment (South Port). It also had a roach problem that never went away. The ones south of 71st seem nice enough to me. Our friends that live there have been happy (Stone Haven), so far.

I'm not familiar enough with Jenks to know what complexes are in and what are not.