Our History

1889 – 1900

Before there was a district

Noble was founded on April 22, 1889 — the day of the first Oklahoma Land Run — when settler Albert Rennie claimed a 160-acre townsite along what would become the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway. Education in Noble began almost immediately. In 1890, just one year after the run, the first community schoolhouse was built two miles south and a half-mile east of town.

The community kept building. In 1893, a second schoolhouse was raised two miles south and one mile east of Noble, on land donated by L.J. Canada — a contribution important enough that the surrounding district eventually carried his name on county school maps. The schoolhouse was originally voted to be called Center Pointe.

In parallel, the private Noble Academy operated from 1891 to 1895, offering what amounted to early secondary instruction in a community that didn't yet have a formal high school. By 1899, Cleveland County maps show Noble as one of more than seventy small school districts dotting the county — most of them one- and two-room rural schoolhouses that would consolidate into modern Noble Public Schools over the next half-century.

1910 – 1949

The first public school in town

In 1910, Noble established its first formal public school inside the city. Funding was limited — the budget allowed for only a six-month term, and the school nearly closed. But the community organized a monthly subscription drive, raised the money, and kept the doors open for the full nine months required by the state.

It's the story Noble keeps telling about itself: when the budget falls short, the neighbors step up.

The new schoolhouse was a square, two-story brick building. The high school occupied the upper floor; the elementary classes filled the ground floor. A small basement housed a boiler room with a steam heater that kept the whole building warm through Oklahoma winters.

In 1937, a Works Progress Administration gymnasium was built next door — one of the many WPA school construction projects that reshaped rural Oklahoma during the New Deal. The first indoor restrooms in Noble schools were tucked into the basement under the stage. In the late 1940s, a home economics building rose on the south side of the gym, with rental meat lockers underneath — a small detail that says everything about a farm-and-ranch community that ran its school like a piece of public infrastructure.

1950 – 1999

Consolidation and growth

Noble High School was built in 1950, with a separate cafeteria building and a fleet of buses bringing rural students in from across the district. Class sizes ranged from 17 to 40. The educators of that era — John K. Hubbard, Bill Fisher, Mary Alice Fisher, Becky Comstock, Charles McAttie, Coach Paul Hansen, Jim Farris, Patricia Hammond English, and many others — became the names that today's grandparents and great-grandparents still remember by heart.

Throughout the 1940s, 50s, and 60s, the dozens of small one- and two-room schoolhouses that had served rural Cleveland County — places with names like Falls, Adair, Capshaw, Robin Hill, Etowah, and Twelve Corners — closed and consolidated into Noble Public Schools. That's why our district today reaches so far beyond the city limits: we inherited the territory of districts that no longer exist. In 1970, a new high school building opened to meet the demands of a student body that had outgrown the 1950 facility. By 2000, K–12 enrollment had reached 2,678.

2010 – Today

A modern district built on community investment

Recent decades have been about renewal. The 2010 School Improvement Bond funded a major round of expansion and renovation at Noble High School and Hubbard Elementary, adding much-needed classroom space, a modern child nutrition facility, and state-of-the-art athletic amenities. Like the subscription drive of 1910, the bond was a public choice — neighbors deciding what their schools should be — and the buildings that resulted are a direct line from that 1890 schoolhouse on the prairie.

Seven years later, the community went back to the ballot box. The 2017 School Improvement Bond funded the most ambitious facilities expansion in district history. At the high school, a new combined gymnasium and performing arts auditorium rose on the south side of campus — a single building with a shared lobby that opens onto either a competition-grade basketball arena or a tiered, acoustically tuned auditorium with stage, side wings, and full dressing rooms. The architecture was deliberate: Friday-night basketball and the spring musical now share the same front door, the same trophy wall, the same "Home of the Bears" entrance. Athletics and the arts, side by side, treated as equals.

The 2017 bond reached every level of the district. Pioneer Elementary received a new building of its own — a dedicated home for fourth and fifth graders with a curved, light-filled front entrance on Ash Street and a floor plan built around the library at its center. John K. Hubbard Elementary added twelve new classrooms, two new restrooms, and a covered walkway connecting the addition to the original building, giving second and third graders the room they needed to grow. Katherine I. Daily Elementary received the renewal investments that keep an older building serving its youngest learners well — exterior window upgrades, kitchen modernization, restroom improvements, interior ceiling replacement, and HVAC upgrades.

Today, Noble Public Schools serves more than 3,000 students across five purpose-built campuses. Our graduation rate has climbed nearly ten points in five years. Our teachers are 100% fully licensed. Our foundation, established by alumni and community members, funds classroom grants and named scholarships every year. And every year, a new class of Noble Bears walks across the same stage their parents and grandparents crossed — now under the lights of a brand-new auditorium, in a building they helped vote into existence — ready for whatever comes next.