Last summer, Astor K-8 principal Blake Robertson gave his fourth and fifth grade teachers a choice.
There were enough students in those grades, Robertson said, that teachers at the North Portland school could “unblend” their classrooms if they so desired.
In other words, the school could support two fourth grade and two fifth grade homerooms. Or Astor could stick with the approach it had used since 2021 and mix the two grades together across four classrooms.
Evan Harrelson, a 4th and 5th grade teacher at the school, said the choice for him and his colleagues was easy: They’d stick with the blends.
Blended classrooms, he said, “have allowed me to extend learning for kids, so we can continue (in the fall) where we left off.” Meanwhile, he said he only has to learn the quirks and styles of half as many students every fall, making for smoother transitions.
When Portland Public Schools students stream back to campuses in August, there will be many more blended classrooms like Harrelson’s, as budget cuts and declining enrollment push the district to rely more heavily on the model.
There will be 38 elementary and K-8 schools, out of 57 total, that offer blended classrooms across at least two grade levels, up from just 13 in the most recent school year. And while all but one of the blended classrooms in the 2025-26 school year were in fourth and fifth grades, next year will see many more across younger grades.
The district is planning for 55 blended fourth-fifth grade classrooms, like Harrelson’s, across 20 schools and 40 first-second grade blends across 16 schools. Kindergarten, as the entry point into the public school system remains unblended across the district, and third grade blends are far less common because that’s a pivotal year when students first take state standardized tests.
Just two schools, Rose City Park Elementary and Cesar Chavez K-8 will have second-third grade blends, according to school district data.
The pending change has caused some consternation among families, who’ve worried publicly about scaling up the format so quickly.
And in remarks to the school board on Tuesday, Angela Bonilla, the outgoing president of the Portland Association of Teachers pointedly noted that the district’s own review of its current blended classroom found that learning specialists were often called in to co-teach subjects like math, with students at different skills levels. That will be more challenging next year, Bonilla said, since some of those positions were lost in the district’s most recent round of layoffs.
The impetus behind blended classrooms is financial. Enrollment at Portland Public Schools has declined by 6,000 students, or about 12%, since 2019, and is projected to continue to fall by another 12% in the coming decade, fueled by a low birth rate, high housing costs and fewer families choosing public schools.
That enrollment cliff has hit elementary schools first, creating a compounding math problem for the school district. Over the next six months, school board members will consider proposals to close around 10 schools in response to declining enrollment. In the interim, the district has turned to blended elementary school classrooms to manage the issue.
Imagine there are only 20 fourth graders, but 32 fifth graders in a school.
A principal like Robertson could assign each grade level to a single classroom, creating a small and manageable class size at fourth grade, and a large and unwieldy one at fifth grade. Creating two fifth grade classrooms with 16 students apiece is financially out of reach in a perpetually cash-strapped school district where the average cost to pay salary and benefits for a full-time educator is $160,851.
Or a principal can blend the two grades, creating two classes, each with 26 students.
However, the on-the-ground reality of blends don’t always work out so neatly.
For starters, Astor’s teachers chose to blend, unlike the dozens of teachers across the district who are being assigned to lead blended classrooms next fall. Some teachers have also been reassigned, bumped or lost their jobs due to the growth in blended classrooms.
In a 20-page report from February about what has — and hasn’t — worked about its existing blended classrooms, researchers at Portland Public Schools said mid-year testing data in both reading and math had found no statistical difference between academic outcomes for fourth and fifth graders in blended classrooms and those who were not.
The district’s researchers got generally positive feedback about the multi-grade formats from the handful of teachers and principals they surveyed, but offered some caveats: Blended grades require more time for teacher collaboration, preparation and planning, they found, and schools should avoid having only one blended classroom, while other students in the same age groups are in mono-grade rooms.
Principals and teachers from both Astor and Skyline K-8 in Northwest Portland also told researchers that blends should not be a “here today, gone tomorrow” strategy, particularly because moving in and out of the model as enrollment fluctuates can leave some students with curriculum gaps.
Melissa Stern, the PTA president at Skyline who has had three children in blended classrooms there, said she understood why some families found the prospect of the blends jarring, given the lack of broad familiarity with the format and fears that it will be hard for teachers to balance a broad range of skill levels.
For her family, the blended classrooms were a “gift,” Stern said, giving them the chance to be mentors, form friendships with older and younger peers and to build deeper relationships with their teachers.
Harrelson said Astor’s teachers were helped by being able to connect with educators at Skyline. The school has had blends for many years, said teacher Jet Griffith, who leads a combined third and fourth grade classroom at the school, and whose own children were taught there in blended classrooms.
“Fifty percent of your class knows the routines, and the role of being the ‘big kids,’” Griffith said. “You already have established relationships with families with blends, so you can focus on the rest of the class.”
Harrelson and Griffith said the format can be helpful for both students who need a review of foundational skills and those who need acceleration. The state’s English Language Arts and social studies standards for the skills that fourth grade students and fifth grade students need to master are fairly similar, they said, and not difficult to adapt.
For example, at the start of a school year, fifth graders might be eager to get going on a five-paragraph essay, Griffith said, while fourth graders might produce two or three paragraphs.
The exception is math. Most schools use a “walk-to-math” format in which students are reunited with the rest of their grade for math lessons, Harrelson said.
When math does come up during blended learning time, Scarlett, an 11-year-old Astor student, said it’s a chance for the fifth graders to lead.
“Sometimes the fourth graders write an equation, and I check their work,” she said. “It makes me feel more responsible.”
Another bonus: Teachers say fifth graders hang on to their elementary school innocence just a little bit longer when half their classmates are fourth graders.
“The drama decreases,” Harrelson said. “There’s a big culture shift by the end of fifth grade, but this keeps them grounded in elementary school.”
Some of his students said they were wary about the blended model at the beginning of the year, but had learned to appreciate it.
“At first, I was like, will the older kids judge me?” said a fourth grader named Jordan, who will turn 10 in July. “But I made a bunch of friends.”
His classmate, 10-year-old Paige, echoed his assessment.
“When you first find out, you’re nervous,” she said. “There’s older kids, you don’t know them that well. Now, we’re going to miss them when they go up to middle school next year. And Mr. H. treats us all equally. Sometimes I forget who is in fourth grade and who’s in fifth grade. We all learn equally.”
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