In an effort to meet a growing need in the northwest portion of the Oklahoma City metro, Putnam City Schools has approved a dual-language immersion charter school to open for the 2027-2028 school year. The effort stands as the first charter school authorized by the Putnam City Schools Board of Education and an attempt to embrace the district’s continued diversity.
Puentes y Puertas — Spanish for “bridges and doors” — has been the long-running dream of founder Robert Ruiz, who said “a lot of thought and a lot of intentionality” has gone into the project.
“It has been a very exciting process, a lot of work,” Ruiz said. “We started this process many, many years ago. In fact, some of the initial conversations of this school happened over 10 years ago.”
Those initial conversations coincided with apparent growth in the district’s Hispanic population. For the 2025-2026 school year, Putnam City Schools reported having 7,524 Hispanic students enrolled, according to data available from the Oklahoma State Department of Education. With a total enrollment of 18,122, that means 41.5 percent of the district’s population is Hispanic. The district had 5,475 Hispanic students nearly a decade ago in the 2016-2017 school year, a 28.1 percent rate when total enrollment equaled 19,475 students.
“Since maybe 2022, somewhere along there, our demographics changed,” said Judy Mullen Hopper, a member of the Putnam City Schools Board of Education. “[Nearly a] majority of our students are Hispanic, so you could see a drastic need for that.”
In its first year, the public charter school will serve pre-kindergarten, kindergarten and first-grade students, with a goal of adding a grade each year through fifth, and then expanding to middle school. The school is set to launch with an 80:20 language model in early grades with an emphasis on Spanish, while gradually shifting to a 50:50 model.
Ruiz explained that students from Spanish-speaking households can find it difficult to keep up with their peers in terms of learning English, let alone other subjects.
“As those students attain English language competency, if they are able to attain it, they are falling behind in most of the other courses,” Ruiz said. “We went through a community design process. But as we were talking about the design of our school, parents were really telling us, ‘Math is math. Science is science, right? If a student is coming in, why could they not continue to learn math and science in their native language?’ I know some of the answers (to) ‘why,’ because sometimes schools lack the resources of people to do that.”
At Puentes y Puertas, Ruiz said English-language learners — known as ELL students — will be positioned to grow their English language skills while continuing to study their native language.
“It is difficult to be literate in a foreign language if you are not literate in your native language,” Ruiz said.
Puentes y Puertas Board member Hilda De León Xavier was involved in the “community design process,” and she said “the community is very happy.”
“I wanted the whole world to know about it,” De León Xavier said. “Even professors from other schools, they send me private messages (asking) about how can they get involved.”
In a LinkedIn post about the school, De León Xavier said she fell in love with the vision for the school six years ago when she learned about its prospect.
“I feel incredibly happy because, together with them, we are also making history for our community,” De León Xavier wrote. “I hope many of our children will attend this school.”
‘Surpassing their monolingual peers’
If all goes to plan, Puentes y Puertas will become one of only a handful of schools in Oklahoma leaning into a dual-language model. Originally authorized by OKCPS but now authorized by the state, Western Gateway is a dual-language immersion school teaching English and Spanish in southwest Oklahoma City. In Norman, Le Monde International School is an English, French and Spanish immersion school. In Tulsa Public Schools, Zarrow International School teaches English and Spanish, while Eisenhower International School pairs English education with Spanish and French tracts. This fall, OKCPS is reopening Adelaide Lee as a dual-language school.
At Puentes y Puertas, Ruiz said academics will be centered around biliteracy and bilingualism.
“What that means is that, whether you are coming in speaking English or you are coming in speaking the partner language — which in this case in going to be Spanish — you will basically have an additive process to learning both languages,” Ruiz said. “All the study and all (of) the academics are centered around biliteracy and bilingualism. But at the beginning of the process, the students will have a little heavier emphasis on the partner language, mostly because they are already getting quite a bit of a dose of the environmental language. So in this case, since we are in the (United States), the environmental language is English.”
Ruiz said the framework should help students with science and math, as well as English learning and literacy — a key topic in the education and political realm over the past year.
“When we are thinking about early literacy and phonics, there are a lot of things that transfer, or knowledge that bridges,” Ruiz said. “So if you learn math, if you learn science in Spanish, all of that knowledge is going to bridge with you into English, right? And vice versa. In Spanish, one of the few things that does not bridge are the actual phonics. But the concept of phonics does bridge. And phonics is actually a little easier in Spanish, and super important for the science of reading. So then, as students learn the concept of using phonics in order to be able to read and have that literature component, then they are able to use that concept of phonics.”
Ruiz also noted research showing students in dual language model schools often outpace monolingual students.
“In the early stages of education, there may be a little bit of lag on standardized tests, just because of the foundation that they are building,” Ruiz said. “But pretty much by the fifth grade, they are surpassing their monolingual peers across the board academically.”
A 2016 research article published in the International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism examined math achievement in third and fourth grade among students in dual language immersion models, as well as those who are not. Researchers found “the (dual language immersion) model of early math instruction in a target language, as implemented in Utah, may outperform monolingual math instruction.” The article also noted that “the existing body of research suggests that students in dual language immersion programs are able to achieve academically, and perhaps even outperform their peers in monolingual programs.”
A longtime public relations professional, a partner with Enye Advertising and an OKC community advocate, Ruiz also believes that having educators who are more accustomed to Hispanic students’ culture and circumstances will play a positive role in outcomes.
“Does the teacher believe that, regardless of the child’s background, socioeconomics — any of those things, any of those factors — that they can still achieve at the highest level? And then the other side of that is that the student must also have a belief that they can achieve at the highest level,” Ruiz said. “That is helped through several factors, but one of those things is, like I said, having a teacher that may be from the same kind of background, and the studies have shown that over and over again from people from all sorts of backgrounds..”
Beyond his goal to foster positive academic outcomes, Ruiz also hopes to provide students with a robust cultural experience.
“If we can normalize and lift up really varying cultures and varying backgrounds and people of all sorts of heritages, then I think that makes for a more positive impact on those students, on those families and the community in general,” Ruiz said.
‘Hopeful that we can work as partners’
Although the Putnam City Public Schools Board of Education approved the charter school’s contract unanimously May 4, its president and a longtime educator-turned-board member each expressed skepticism about how successful Puentes y Puertas can ultimately be.
“I said that in my comments whenever I agreed to voting on it,” Mullen Hopper said. “I said I have a hesitation on this, but I am hopeful that we can work as partners.”
A 35-year elementary teacher in Putnam City Schools, Mullen Hopper joined the board by ousting an incumbent in 2021. She said Ruiz’s proposal for the school presented a difficult decision for her because “charter schools really only provide that education for just those who can either get transportation to the school or live close by.” However, she said the application was “perfect” according to the district’s legal team.
The board’s president, Jay Sherrill, expressed a similar hesitancy about approving the charter school.
“I am not like a huge advocate for charter schools or anything along those lines, but I think that I have always thought in my head that if they can serve a need that we are not currently serving, then there is a place or a role that they might have,” Sherrill said. “But really, what it came down to, though, is they had a very well-organized application. (…) I knew that they would get approved, regardless if we charter them or if they go to the state board to be chartered. And so, my thought is that if they are serving the population or the kids within our district, then I would rather at least have some tie to them. There is no oversight or anything like that, but if we do charter them, we will understand a little bit more about their inner workings.”
Both Sherrill and Mullen Hopper indicated a desire to work with Ruiz’s school and learn from the model as education evolves and Putnam City Schools’ student needs change. Sherrill said that by chartering the school, the district could lend a hand through their administrative team and “might be able to learn something from them, too.”
“If their model is a success, I think we should be able to share talents between kind of both parties,” Sherrill said. “And so for me, it looks like it could be a win-win.”
Mullen Hopper said she had spoken with the incoming Putnam City Public Schools Superintendent Kenny Rodrequez, and she said he indicated support for the school.
“His comment was ‘that ship has already sailed,’” Mullen Hopper said about her hesitancy toward charter schools. “So we either embrace it or we miss an opportunity.”
Mullen Hopper added that Rodrequez’s perspective sealed her support for the school.
Rodrequez will begin his tenure in July and will replace Fred Rhodes, who served 13 years as superintendent — the longest tenure in the district’s 112-year history.
Meanwhile, the Oklahoma Public School Resource Center has also provided Puentes y Puertas with support through its School Design Center incubator program. The program offers coaching and access to “an ecosystem of supports” as budding school leaders work to stand up new schools. Puentes y Puertas also received a $2 million grant from OPSRC through the Charter School Program subgrant program. The federal Department of Education provides Charter School Program Grants to various organizations around the country to distribute via subgrants.
“The goal is academic achievement first, with bilingualism and biliteracy serving as long-term assets for students,” Susan Baldwin, OPSRC’s charter technical assistance lead, said of Ruiz’s planned school. “A clear need was identified by the school founder through diligent and thoughtful assessment of the community needs and desires for families in the community, especially targeting those with English learners. But the model is designed to benefit both English-speaking and Spanish-speaking students.”
She also praised Ruiz’s leadership and recognition of how success can be achieved.
“[Puentes y Puertas] understands that a strong dual-language implementation requires more than just bilingual teachers,” Baldwell said. “It requires systems, interventions, assessments, family engagement and accountability.”
Ruiz said he also has spoken with Tulsa Honor Academy founder and CEO Elsie Urueta — one of the longest-serving charter school leaders in Oklahoma — about the challenges that Hispanic-serving charter schools face, such as building an adequate teacher pipeline. He said THA is “a great example of what can be done.”
In an email, Urueta said Puentes y Puertas should be seen as an example of “the charter movement working as intended: schools learning from one another and leaders building on what has been proven successful for students and families.”
“Oklahoma families benefit when educators are empowered to innovate and respond directly to the unique needs of their communities,” Urueta said. “Representation matters. In a state where nearly 60 percent of scholars attending brick-and-mortar charter schools are Latino, students and families deserve to see leaders who reflect their community and experiences. I hope this is a sign of continued progress — not just for charter schools, but for education leadership across Oklahoma.”
(Correction: This article was updated at 8:30 a.m. Monday, June 29, to correct reference to charter school authorization and include additional information. The article was updated again at 1:17 p.m. Monday, June 29, to correct reference to the school’s language model.)
