Arts-Focused Schools

A creative, inquiry-driven private K–8 where arts, design, engineering, and science frame multi-age, project-based learning.

A progressive private K–8 on a wooded campus, with thematic mixed-age studios weaving literature, design-tech, math, and arts into projects.

A tuition-free 6–12 arts magnet where students build personalized majors in dance, theater, music, visual arts, or creative writing alongside full academics.

A tuition-free K–5 public arts-focus school where dance, drama, and visual art are woven into the core curriculum every day.

PPS's tuition-free 6–8 arts magnet, where studio art, theatre, dance, and music are built into the school day, not tacked on after.

A tuition-free PK–5, home to KSMoCA, an artist-run contemporary art museum housed inside the building where students curate real exhibitions with PSU faculty and visiting artists, plus free private guitar, ukulele, and piano lessons woven into the school day.

A progressive private PK–6 liberal-arts school with multi-age classrooms and arts integrated across a creative, inquiry-based curriculum.

A Leonard Bernstein Artful Learning school since 1998, Jackson students move through an Experience, Inquire, Create, Reflect cycle, with projects, performances, and exhibitions built into the academic week. Dedicated band, choir, art, and drama teachers anchor the program, and the auditioned Ensemble choir performs and competes nationally, with past trips to Carnegie Hall.

A tuition-free 9–12 high school with a nationally renowned dance program, home to the Jefferson Dancers and JD II performance companies. The arts also run deep beyond dance, with theater, ceramics, photography, and a full slate of music ensembles.

A tuition-free 9–12 arts academy embedded inside Milwaukie High School, where every core class is taught through an arts lens to a small cohort of roughly 270 students, while the full MHS elective and athletics menu stays open. An updated arts center anchors the campus with a 500-seat auditorium, black box theatre, dance room, ceramics studio, and band/orchestra space.

An independent 6–12 college prep where every graduate earns 7 arts credits across visual, performing, and literary or media arts, taught by working professional artists, musicians, and writers. The school stages 3 theatre productions a year in its own Blue Box Theatre, sends the Angry Pigeon Music Collective to venues around Portland, and closes each May with ArtsWeek showcases.

A tuition-free K–8 PPS focus option where drama, dance, music, and period crafts are built into each history unit rather than taught as electives, culminating in whole-cluster performances.

The arts 'strength' here is music. Valley Catholic runs its own Music School on campus, with 15 instructors offering private lessons alongside orchestra, pep band and flute choir. Every 4th grader learns violin in music class, and high schoolers can take choir, band and AP Music Theory, with visual arts and photography rounding out the fine arts program.

A small Catholic 9–12 offering a classical, integrated liberal-arts program with core fine arts and Socratic seminars.

A two-day-a-week classical Christian program (K–4) with the trivium, Latin, and the arts integral to a classical education.

A part-time/supplemental classical program (5–12) built on Great Books and the humanities, with the fine arts integral to a seminar-based liberal-arts education.

A classical Christian PK–12 where music and art are treated as core subjects. Younger students learn by chanting and singing, choir is required from grade 3, and every student enters a local and a national art contest each year.

A 6–12 classical Christian where arts are required, not elective: 5 years of studio art, 5 of music (strings, then choir and composition), 3 of drama with full-length plays including Shakespeare, and 2 of art history.

A classical, Christ-centered K–12. Arts are treated as essential, not elective: art and music through the grammar years, studio art in Logic School, and a 4-time OSAA state-champion concert choir.