Arbor School’s essential and distinctive structures were designed to meet several crucial goals:

Balance

Our name is designed to point to this fundamental quality of the school.  We seek to balance the following elements:

arts and sciences
inquiry and expression
challenge and practice
requirements and choice
flexibility and high standards
community and individual
mind and body
beauty and utility

Relationship

Arbor is dedicated to the notion that, in order to optimize their intellectual and emotional growth, children are in need of sympathetic and observant adults who seek to understand them as individuals and find the most effective ways of working with them. As a result, you will find at Arbor a learning environment designed to promote teacher/student relationships and to be flexible enough to utilize a wide range of instructional strategies.

Engaged Minds

We work to foster in our students the drive for understanding and mastery that are hallmarks of being human. We challenge them with big ideas and projects requiring hard thinking and effortful doing. Being asked repeatedly to plan, create and evaluate, they become seekers, doers, and problem solvers.

Real Responsibilities

Buddies, garden and goat work, classroom maintenance, independent work, chores, community service, recycling, and reforestation – these are but a few of the ways in which students are regularly expected to take on personal and other‑directed responsibilities. 

Time

We value time... to grow up, to finish, to work deeply, to come together, to share food, play games, talk, and make music.

Interdisciplinary Work

Arbor students expect to learn by observing, drawing, calculating, building, imagining, graphing, measuring, charting, dramatizing, writing, hypothesizing, speaking, reading, painting, and designing. They expect to explore geometry mathematically and artistically; to experience stories by mapping them, retelling them, and inventing them; to understand a culture by investigating its geography, its religion, its art, its literature, its history; to grasp the complexities of physics by modeling, reading, testing, and debating.

While our fundamental goals for literacy and numeracy are congruent with those of public schools, our size, structure, and freedom from state mandates allows us significant flexibility and creativity in how we approach educating our students. We do refer to state and national standards, such as the Common Core and the Next Generation Science Standards, and we draw from nationally recognized curricula such as San Francisco Unified School District Math Core Curriculum and Lucy Calkins Units of Study for Literacy. One specific way we differ from public schools is that Arbor does not give grades or use standardized tests. Our work is process-based, returning to concepts in order to develop stamina, deepen knowledge, find creative ways to express understanding and endeavor toward mastery. In following our graduates, we know that they fare well and thrive in both public and private high schools.

How the day begins varies from grade level to grade level, as is developmentally appropriate. For our younger students that means a Choice time before the morning gathering. For our oldest students, Seminar opens the day. For all, days are planned around blocks of time dedicated to Literacy, Math, Science, Music, Design, and Thematic Studies. For K-3, the first half of the school day has more emphasis on integrated academic studies with the second half of the day  reserved for P.E, Music, and extended project work. The 4-8th grades have P.E. in the middle of the day, and integrated academic subjects across the school day. While the days and weeks are well planned, our teachers have the freedom to adjust in order to be responsive to student needs and to accommodate special projects. We believe that recess is also an integral part of the school day and provide ample time outside. The last part of the day for all Arbor students is reserved for Jobs and Community Service as we care for our campus, classrooms, and one another. 

Science, history, and literature provide the fundamental thematic structures of the Arbor curriculum. Each sub-topic that the children explore is important for its content and for the opportunities it provides to develop concepts. Topics for each level are chosen carefully to match the developmental levels of and reflect the interests common to children of that age group. Sub-topics must be rich in possibilities for the integration of many subject areas and central to the development of crucial concepts within the year’s overarching theme. Specific activities and emphases will vary from year to year as the individual teachers create new ways to engage children’s participation and as individual students chart new directions in pursuing personally meaningful questions.

We take a broad developmental perspective at Arbor, recognizing that age doesn’t correlate in any precise way to maturity. Even in a class organized around a single age, a wide range of maturity in social and intellectual terms is clearly evident. So, rather than plan for one developmental stage, we orchestrate shared projects in which all the students can participate in ways appropriate to their individual maturational levels. At the same time, we provide individualized, continuous work on academic skills for each student. The success of mixed-age groups is due, in part, to Arbor’s low student-teacher ratio: from 9:1 in the Primaries up to 11:1 for 4th through 8th grade.

It is our contention that developmentally this time of life rightly still belongs to childhood. Further, in the context of an elementary school, middle-grade students can exercise in a genuine way their drive for independence and self-definition, for recognition as competent and mature beings, and for undertaking, with developing idealism, tasks that have a visible result in the world. As the olders, and not the relegated middles, they rightly see themselves as the responsible and capable ones. That is the kind of identity we want for them.

In the course of each day students at Arbor School balance their activities between group projects and individual work. Students progress at their own mastery level in reading, writing, and mathematics while participating in joint thematic studies. Once a shared base of knowledge is established during the study of any one topic, the students delve more deeply into individually chosen sub-topics. In addition, individual initiative flourishes so that on any given day one may find students pursuing a rich variety of lines of inquiry and modes of expression. Throughout the work, be it group or individual, an attempt is made to tailor the methods so as to align them with the perceived learning strategies of individual students and to articulate expectations and standards in such a way as to provide both encouragement and appropriate challenge to individual students.

It is our conviction that conferences, both formal and informal, and narrative reports are the best vehicles for conveying a rich sense of the experience of each child at Arbor School. Grades and standardized testing, therefore, are not employed as measures of performance. Instead, teachers assemble and review samples of writing and problem solving, art and design, to track growth and to plan for next steps.

Arbor draws students from across the Portland Metro area. In order to ease the commute, we make every effort to assist families with carpool possibilities. Additionally an ecoShuttle school bus takes students to and from NE Portland. The bus partnership is facilitated by Arbor and funded by the parents of the riders. This service has been paused during this time but we expect it to resume in the fall of 2022.

Parent volunteers support the work of teachers in our classrooms and join us in working as stewards of our campus. We do not require parents to volunteer. Instead, we seek to offer a broad range of opportunities to those who are able to give of their time and energy with the knowledge that doing so is integral to the program and to the school community. Our strong parent-teacher association also brings parents together to organize and run community events throughout the year.

They do well, both by their own account and by the normative standards most schools which they attend use to compare achievement. We work hard to help each of our graduates find a high school that is the right match and our graduates attend public and private schools across the city. Then, having helped them learn to stand with sure footing, they go off, armed with the knowledge and skills, habits and attitudes we have stressed, and figure out just what is needed to succeed in the new environments in which they find themselves.

Arbor graduates attend both public and private high schools. Over the years we have seen exiting 8’s and their families choose to continue private schooling 40% to 60% of the time, with the balance attending their local public school. A few of our graduates have gone to out-of-state boarding schools as well. The Senior staff is helpful to families as they are considering which high school choices will best suit their child’s interests and strengths. Each year, many of the local high schools offer presentations to our 8’s, interested in what Arbor graduates can add to their communities.

We do not have a cafeteria. Students eat in their classrooms or, when the weather invites, outside. Snacks and lunches are brought from home. However, twice a week, parents may pre-order lunches: pizza one day, burritos and quesadillas on another. This program is a fundraiser for the Arbor Parent Teacher Association.

8:00am is the earliest drop off time for all students. We ask that all students are in their classrooms by 8:30am. The day ends at 2:45pm for the younger students and 3:00pm for the older students. We now have an aftercare program that runs until 4:30pm daily.

Beginning in 6th grade, all Arbor students study Spanish.

Arbor is an intentionally small school. We keep enrollment between 187-190, so that class sizes can remain low and that all the children and adults can know one another.

Students may arrive as early as 8:00am and may participate in an aftercare program that runs until 4:30.

There is not a set program and classes offered depends on teacher availability and student demand. In recent years we have offered: cross-country and track for 2nd-8th grade, Lego Robotics, Tech Makerspace for 2nd-8th grades, ChessWizards for all students, and MathCounts for 6th-8th grades.

Yes, each year we have more applicants than open spaces. For families we wish we could accept but do not have room for when offers are made mid-March, we offer a place in the Wait Pool. Should a spot open up later in the spring or summer, we extend offers to families in the Wait Pool first. Each year, we have accepted some families from the Wait Pool.

The special relationship that alumni have with the school will be noted as they submit applications for their children. However, legacy status does not privilege those applications and those students will be given consideration consistent with all students wishing to attend Arbor School.