It’s been a rough few months of school schedules for Portland parents — and next fall will mean yet another set of changes, especially for the youngest students in Portland Public Schools.
PPS officials have announced new schedules for fall 2024, which push elementary schools to start and end earlier. The schedules also attempt to make middle school schedules more uniform. The result is that elementary and middle schools will have start and release times that aren’t aligned well, creating potential dropoff and pickup challenges for the parents of children at multiple schools.
“At K-5 schools, students will now start at 8:00 AM and end at 2:30,” the district wrote in a schedule summary shared with parents.
The start times for middle schools are an hour and 15 minutes later, the district said, starting at 9:15 a.m. and letting out at 4 p.m. The changes to elementary and middle school schedules are an effort to standardize start and dismissal times across the district, which will result in some campuses changing when school begins and ends each day.
In this Aug. 29, 2023, file photo, students at Sitton Elementary School in Portland walk from the bus to the front entrance of school for their first day of classes. When school resumes this fall, students will face changed schedules aimed, in part, at addressing school bus capacity.
Caden Perry / OPB
In their explanation, district officials noted they were trying to add 15 minutes of daily instruction for elementary and middle schoolers while also creating a consistent, seven-period day for all of the district’s middle schools. The district also agreed to additional planning time for teachers in the contract it settled, concluding the Portland teachers strike.
“Accommodating these changes while supporting 410 minutes per week of teacher planning time and aligning our transportation systems requires us to adopt common start and stop times,” the district said.
Some parents, however, are not pleased.
One reached out to OPB calling it “absurd” that parents could have to spend up to three hours a day dropping off and picking up their children if one is at an elementary school and another is a few years older in middle school. Another parent noted that many families likely won’t be able to get their elementary-aged students by 2:30 p.m. every day, and that’s likely to increase how much families have to spend on after-school supervision.
While instruction and planning time are driving some of the schedule changes, the reason for the offset times at elementary and middle schools is less about those priorities, according to district officials.
“It’s all about the buses,” a district spokesperson acknowledged in an email to OPB.
Portland Public Schools has struggled in recent years to run bus routes across the large urban district with a limited number of drivers.
The district’s K-8 schools have a schedule that splits the difference between elementary and middle schools. They start at 8:45 a.m., while their elementary students will leave at 3:15 p.m. and middle schoolers at 3:30 p.m.
High schools are scheduled to start classes at 8:26 a.m. and end at 3:30 p.m.