Starting this thread had a pop-up for 2005! No kidding.
Anyway, some districts in my area are proposing this, or have done it. They would have longer days, and take either Monday or Friday off. Of course, this is very controversial.
Has anyone here lived in a district that did it, and how did it work out?
My suspicion is that it’s just change-for-the-sake-of-change. Everyone knows that the schools aren’t very good, so we have to find something, anything, to change, to say we’re doing something.
I don’t know that. All of my kids went to decent public schools.
To the topic, the school day is already long. I’m not sure I’d trade a three day weekend for four longer days.
ETA: Perhaps the teachers prefer this?
Both my kids went to a school district that had a M-Th schedule. They started after this schedule was implemented so I don’t know if the school day was extended significantly to make up for the lack of instruction on Friday. I assume it did. Still, they were released around 3:30 or 4 each day IIRC.
The biggest problem from a parent’s perspective is finding daycare on Fridays. Local daycares were always full on Fridays.
We were friends with two teachers in that district and they absolutely loved it. They worked on Fridays but could spend the day lesson planning, organizing, working on PD stuff, and attending meetings – all stuff they couldn’t do during the regular school day. It made their lives much easier.
Many districts do it to save money by not having transportation and school buildings closed that one day per week.
An instructive clue might come from the answer to the question: who has the most power – school kids and their parents, or teachers’ unions and school board administrators?
Slightly confusing wording, but yes, that’s likely a factor. But what about the extra costs to working parents, not to mention the potential challenges of even being able to find the necessary daycare? Daycare is often a scarce resource and throwing this in the laps of two working parents could be a real burden.
Some districts in New Mexico do this, and they’re fighting against a proposal by the Public Education Department that would require them to have as many school days as five-day districts do. Parents in rural districts have come out in droves to protest the proposed change.
One thing I hadn’t considered is that some kids in rural districts (remember, NM is a big state) spend hours on buses to get to school every day. If you have a four-day week, they get more hours of school for the time spent on traveling to school.
Hard to imagine how working parents would support this. What do they do with the additional day off for their child? It seems childcare costs would certainly increase. Is this another nail in the coffin for public education? Instead of fixing it which is hard, many seem to want to kill it which is easier.
The high school where I taught did this, although we went to a 4.5day week, not a 4-day, and it was only the high school. The reason behind it was not change for the sake of change. It was because so many kids in athletics and forensics were missing Friday afternoon classes because teams were traveling. It’s pretty tough planning lessons when half your students aren’t going to be there. We started school about 25 minutes earlier, and kids got out 30 minutes later. We were already on the block schedule, so on Fridays, classes were about an hour long instead of 90 minutes.
In some ways, it would have been better to go to a four-day week because this was Wyoming, where teams sometimes had to travel 7 or 8 hours to get to the game or tournament, so we still had some kids missing classes on Fridays. However, coaches and some businesses hated the idea because it meant practice would start later and kids wouldn’t get to after-school jobs until later.
I know some districts have moved to four-day weeks for students and use Fridays or Friday afternoons for PLC’s. (Basically departments working on curriculum, tests, etc.)
At any rate, parents as a whole had no problem with it.
My Junior year of High school I had a MT_TF schedule. All “homework” was assigned for Wednesday, so the other evenings we were free. It was a great way to do things for teenagers. We weren’t up 'til midnight all week doing homework, and we had a day to sleep in and absorb at our own pace.
Most of the kids had serious extracurriculars like ballet or gymnastics, or ice skating, things that took a lot of hours and required real rest in between. I think it would be a great way to run a whole County. Everyone benefitted.
But yes, it would be problematic for younger kids. The County/State would need to step in and require employers to allow work-from-home wherever possible. Gov’t would also have to provide daycare where it was not possible to work from home.