With roots that go back to 1859, the school was formed by the 1957 merger between the Catlin Hillside School and the Gabel Country Day School. The school had initially hoped to expand onto the Gabel school property, but lost it to eminent domain. Since the Catlin property was too small to support the school, Catlin Gabel purchased the Honey Hollow Farm in 1958, relocating the Upper School there in the fall. Nine years later, the Middle School relocated there, followed by the Lower School a year later, in 1968. The school sold the Catlin Hillside buildings to the Portland Art Museum for its art school. The buildings were later converted to a community center for the Hillside neighborhood. In 2005, the Malone Family Foundation endowed Catlin Gabel with a $2 million grant for financial aid under its Malone Scholars Program.
Students
As of the 2014–15 school year, there were 760 students. The student body is divided into four groups: Upper School, Middle School, Lower School, and Beginning School.
Catlin Gabel has operated a team in the FIRST Robotics Competition since 2005, called "The Flaming Chickens". The team has consistently qualified for the FIRST World Championships competition almost every year. Catlin Gabel has been a successful participant in the Oregon Mock Trial competition, and has often gone to the national competition.
Sports
Catlin Gabel's traditional rival in athletics is the Oregon Episcopal School. The Middle School fields teams of soccer, volleyball, cross-country, basketball, and track. The Upper School competes in soccer, cross-country, basketball, baseball, track, golf, swimming, skiing, women's volleyball, and tennis.
Beginning in 2017, several former students began writing about sexual abuse by faculty on social media. Coinciding with the Me Too movement, the number of accounts increased, prompting the school to commission an investigation in October 2019. The investigation issues a report on November 11, 2019. It found that at least 21 Catlin Gabel faculty had taken advantage of their positions at the school in committing various degrees of sexual impropriety. This ranged from the rape of a 6th grade minor to generally inappropriate behavior and relationships between faculty and students that went back as early as the 1960s and was recorded occurring as recently as 2016. In December 2019, the Washington County Sheriff's Department opened a criminal investigation of the school. In January 2020, The Oregonian documented allegations by over 15 former students from age 21 to 61. Six more former students sued the school in April 2020 saying they were fondled, groped, and sexually abused by former teachers Richardson Shoemaker, Robert Ashe, Art Leo and Sam Crawley. A total of 16 former students have filed suit again Catlin Gabel.
