Southern district is latest to adopt the 4-day school week: 'We have to think outside the box'

Beth Greenfield
·Senior Editor
Photo: Getty Images
Photo: Getty Images

A Louisiana school district near the Mississippi River became the country’s latest to approve a four-day school week.

“We have to think outside of the box when it comes to stuff like this,” Avoyelles Parish School Board member Rickey Adams told KALB on Wednesday, a day after the board voted 7-2 in favor of a shortened school week. The decision was reportedly motivated by rising performance scores of a nearby parish that long ago adopted a four-day week, financial savings and, most of all, to help with teacher recruitment.

“We are dead last in the state in teachers’ salaries,” Avoyelles Parish superintendent Blaine Dauzat tells Yahoo Lifestyle, stressing that the main push to create a Tuesday through Friday week (with an extra hour added each day) came from wanting to attract and retain teachers for the 5,300 students who make up the rural, 10-school district. “This could be a bargaining chip for us.”

As Avoyelles High School principal Michael Rachal told KALB, “I had a teacher from Pineville High School call me today and say, ‘If your four-day work week passes, give me a call.’”

The move to adopt a four-day school week, according to Journalist’s Resource, follows that of an estimated 560 other school districts across 25 states — with Montana, Oklahoma, Oregon and Colorado leading the way. Colorado had its latest district convert to a four-day week just this year, at a school district in Brighton, citing both financial savings and teacher recruitment and retention as motivating factors.

It’s also proven to be popular in New Mexico, where four-day school weeks were becoming so commonplace that state legislators placed a moratorium on the practice in 2018, over concerns about not-yet-known negative impacts on the students.

A handful of education researchers have studied the results, which have been mixed: While one Colorado study showed an improvement in math scores, a similar study found no discernible difference. Another Colorado study found a rise in juvenile crime. In Missouri, a study found the four-day week improved staff morale. Minimal financial savings are also possible with such a switch, with the average savings hovering between .4 percent and 2.5 percent (with a max savings of 5.43 percent), according to a 2011 study.

Education experts expressed skepticism about the practice in a 2017 article for the Brookings Institution, “A troubling contagion: The rural 4-day school week.” After pointing out that savings had been elusive and that rural kids actually benefit from spending consistent days in school, they wrote, “The idea has proved contagious because adults like it: Teachers have more free time, and stay-at-home parents like the convenience of taking kids to doctors and doing errands on Friday. Many district leaders who have recently adopted the idea say that it gives them an advantage in competing for teachers, who understandably like the idea of the same pay for 20 percent fewer days at work.”

For Avoyelles Parish, the recent decision was complicated by specific factors, including word of a new charter school opening in the area. “There became concern we would have to possibly consider closing some of our schools,” Dauzat says, hoping that switching to a four-day week might keep students from leaving the public system. “Schools are the lifeblood of these little towns.”

So far, he adds, reactions from the parents on the vote from the board — made up of almost entirely new members who are “pushing for change” — are mixed. “There’s considerable pushback,” Dauzat admits. “Parents are definitely concerned about having care for their kids on the day off, and about adding an hour to the day and the extra-curricular activities and how to balance all that.”

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