The new heart of Tulsa Tech's oldest campus now has a price on paper. A City of Tulsa permit dated Oct. 20 covers a "new office, classroom, and lab building for Tulsa Technology Center" at 3420 S. Memorial Drive, with a reported value of $83.7 million.
That address is the Lemley Memorial Campus, where the school started in 1965. The new building is the last and largest piece of a three-phase rebuild that has been in the works for more than a decade.
Three phases, one campus
The campus opened on 40 acres along Memorial Drive and the Broken Arrow Expressway, according to Tulsa Tech. It's the district's original campus, and today it houses carpentry, electrical, HVAC, masonry and plumbing programs alongside welding and a long list of health care programs.
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The first two phases of the rebuild are finished. The Industry Training Center opened in 2018 and the Client Service Center in 2021, TulsaPeople reported. The third phase was put on hold for several years during COVID.
It came back in October 2025. Tulsa Tech announced the final phase of a $122 million redesign, built around a new Career Education Center of nearly 350,000 square feet, the Tulsa World reported. The project replaces buildings that are nearly 60 years old and brings advanced manufacturing, construction trades and information technology into one central spot on the campus. Tulsa Tech expects it done for the 2028-29 school year.
The new building goes up on an open stretch of grass in the middle of the campus, informally called the "field of dreams," according to TulsaPeople.
What the permit says
The permit's own description is one line: a new office, classroom and lab building. It's the only permit we hold at the address.
The two numbers measure different things. The $83.7 million is the value reported to the city for this building permit, not a contract amount. The $122 million in the Tulsa World story is the district's figure for the whole redesign.
Work is already under way. Tulsa Tech's own campus page says "our new classroom building is under construction," and it has closed a walkway and two blocks of parking around the site.
Built for a wait list
The new building is meant to add room to teach. Tulsa Tech already serves more students than any of the 29 districts in Oklahoma's CareerTech system, and it can't take everyone who applies.
"We have about 1,000 students on a wait list annually," superintendent and CEO Steve Tiger told TulsaPeople. Full-time enrollment grew from about 4,000 early last decade to almost 6,000 in fiscal 2024, the magazine reported. With the new center moving ahead, Tiger said, "We're looking forward now to getting back into growth mode."
The district is also down a campus for now. A March 6 tornado damaged the north Peoria campus, and Tulsa Tech estimated a full rebuild could take two years, KRMG reported. Students there moved to other campuses.
Tulsa's newest big employers are leaning on the school too. Meta, which is building its first Oklahoma data center on the city's east side, is paying for a program with Tulsa Tech and Tulsa Community College that it expects to turn out more than 200 graduates a year in data center trades, according to Meta.
Schools are moving up the national pipeline
Tulsa isn't alone. Institutional projects, a group that includes schools, hospitals and government buildings, drove construction planning in September. Dodge Construction Network's planning index for that group rose 9.4% from August, with a "strong uptick" in education among the reasons, Construction Dive reported.
On Memorial Drive, the next step is going vertical on the field of dreams, with the doors set to open for the 2028-29 school year.
How we count
The permit comes from the City of Tulsa's permit records for 3420 S. Memorial Drive, dated Oct. 20, 2026. The value is the one reported on the permit. Project details come from the reporting linked here.
See Tulsa's latest permit numbers, updated weekly.
Sources
- Tulsa World, "Tulsa Tech spending $122 million to revamp midtown campus" (Oct. 11, 2025): tulsaworld.com
- TulsaPeople, "60 years of serving students: How Tulsa Tech develops skilled workers to meet the community's needs" (August 2025): tulsapeople.com
- Tulsa Tech, Lemley Memorial Campus page: tulsatech.edu
- KRMG, "Tulsa Tech Peoria Campus students to resume classes at alternate locations March 23" (March 13, 2026): krmg.com
- Meta, "Breaking Ground on a New AI-Optimized Data Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma" (April 21, 2026): about.fb.com
- Construction Dive, "Education, healthcare projects boosted construction planning in September" (Oct. 8, 2026): constructiondive.com
- City of Tulsa permit BLDC-260949-2026.
- Photo: G. Edward Johnson, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons: commons.wikimedia.org
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