About 2,100 schools across 900 districts have adopted four-day school weeks, as of the 2022-23 school year, said an Oregon State University researcher, in an article in K-12 Dive.
It’s been more than six years since Colorado’s 27J Schools implemented a four-day school week, and Superintendent Chris Fiedler says he doesn’t foresee the district going back to a traditional schedule, according to K-12 Dive.
The switch to a shortened school week in Colorado’s 15th largest district came in fall 2018 after 27J Schools failed for six consecutive years to gain voter support for increasing local taxes to boost education funding, including teacher pay, according to Fiedler.
Given the competitive “dog eat dog” nature of school staffing in the Denver metro area, Fiedler says, the district had to think differently about how it would recruit and retain employees.
“The four-day week is the second-best option, and the first-best option is to pay teachers and support staff well,” says Fiedler, who has run the 23,000-student district in Brighton since 2012.
Districts nationwide are increasingly joining the likes of 27J Schools and hopping onto the four-day school week bandwagon. In fact, a total of about 2,100 schools across 900 districts had adopted shorter weeks as of the 2022-23 school year, says Paul Thompson, an economics professor at Oregon State University who researches the model.
Those numbers are up from 1,600 schools and 650 districts embracing four-day weeks in 2019-20, according to Thompson.
Thompson cites teacher recruitment and retention as the key motivating factors for the latest wave of districts taking on shorter weeks. “The four-day school week may offer that additional flexibility in areas where maybe they just can’t offer teachers greater monetary compensation.”
While much anecdotal evidence suggests four-day school weeks are a successful staffing strategy for districts, there’s little empirical research measuring the impact, Thompson says.
Four-day school weeks attract teachers seeking greater work-life balance, but more importantly the model encourages teachers to stay.
Of the 180 Missouri school districts that have adopted four-day weeks, only two school boards have voted to go back to a traditional schedule.
A similar pattern is seen nationwide, with only 10% of schools reverting to five-day school weeks, Thompson says. “There’s very few districts that switch back to the five-day school week, suggesting that there are benefits, or at least perceived benefits, to this school schedule.”
K-12 Dive
