Bartlesville Public Schools began in 1899 and built Garfield School in 1904. Eva Mae Kreep and Lillian Emma Evans, became the first graduating seniors from Garfield in 1907, the same year Oklahoma joined the union as the 46th state. Classes steadily grew from 469 to 800 students. High school classes moved out of the Garfield facility after the spring of 1910 when the original Bartlesville High School was completed. Garfield closed in 1974 and was razed in 1979 to make way for the Bartlesville Community Center. The light-colored stone from above the school's doorway (visible in photo), inscribed "19 · Garfield School · 04", was placed at the northeast corner of Dewey Avenue and Adams Boulevard to commemorate Bartlesville's first permanent school building.

The district's first facility exclusively for high school classes was completed in April 1910 on Dewey Avenue between 10th and 11th streets. Architect C.W. Squires of Emporia, Kansas designed a brick building with four floors plus a basement and clock tower. By 1924 the building, designed for 250 students, housed 373 and the district started planning an expansion at Central Junior High School. The last graduating class of 1926 included W.W. Keeler, grandson of both Nelson Carr, the first white man in the area, and George Keeler, co-founder of the Keeler-Johnstone Store. The 1910 building was abandoned in 1926 and finally razed in 1939 to make way for the Ritz Apartments.

Bartlesville segregated black students from the rest of the student population until 1956, two years after the landmark Supreme Court decision of Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas that ordered the schools across the nation desegregated "with all deliberate speed." Douglass School began in 1907 and Bessie Love was its first high school graduate in 1927. The largest graduating class in the school's history was 24 in 1949. After desegregation in 1956 the school transitioned into a neighborhood elementary school. It closed and was sold in 1971, and in 2012 the last remaining part of the original building was demolished.

Central Junior High was built in 1917 and expanded in the mid 1920s to serve grades 7-12. Cecil "Lefty" Custer was a coach at Central for many years, from a time when the teams were the Yellow Jackets to when they became the Wildcats. Custer Stadium at the current high school was named in his honor when he passed away in 1953. A year of junior college was added to Central in 1927. By the time College High School was built in 1939, Central's green and gray halls were packed with 1,700 students and the uppermost grades left. The facility has remained a junior high/middle school since that time.