More US Schools Moving to Four-Day Week

Several Texas school districts have recently moved to a four-day school week, adding to the growing number of schools on truncated schedules amid teacher shortages across the country.

The Bandera Independent School District in the San Antonio area approved the transition on Monday, local news station KENS reported. It joins several other local districts—the Natalia, Utopia and La Vernia ISDs—that have shifted to four-day weeks.

Superintendent Gary Bitzkie said he hopes the shift helps recruit teachers and improve attendance rates.

“As it becomes increasingly more difficult to recruit and hire public educators, especially in rural districts like Bandera, we have learned from our colleagues around the state that have already moved into a four-day school week that it is a very powerful recruiting tool,” Bitzkie told KENS. Newsweek reached out to Bitzkie for further comment via email.

More than 2,100 schools in nearly 900 districts across the country have four-day school weeks, Paul Thompson, an associate professor of economics at Oregon State University who studies the impact of four-day weeks, said last September.

Four-day weeks have mostly been adopted in rural and western parts of the U.S., with districts citing the shorter weeks as a way to save on costs and boost teacher recruitment, according to Thompson.

“Historically, schools have used this as a way to try to save costs, by reducing the amount of time your school is in operation,” Thompson said in an interview with SciLine last year.

“But more recently, and especially since the pandemic, schools have been turning to this model as a way to try to deal with things like teacher burnout, teacher stress, and as a way to attract and retain teachers in these highly rural districts,” he said.

Newsweek has contacted Thompson for further comment via email.

Few large school districts have adopted the four-day week.

The 27J school district, which is north of Denver, switched to the model in 2018. Superintendent Chris Fiedler told Good Morning America that the move was aimed at recruiting and keeping more teachers when the district’s pay rate was lower than nearby districts with more available funding.

It’s “a way to recruit folks without being able to pay them as well as our surrounding districts,” Fiedler said.

However, research has suggested a four-day week could negatively affect students who had already seen their learning disrupted during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Research by the Rand Corp., which analyzed data from five states—Idaho, Missouri, New Mexico, Oklahoma and South Dakota—found that while student achievement improved in districts with four-day school weeks, it did so more slowly than if the same schools had maintained a five-day week.

This comes as states across the country have been grappling with teacher shortages. Newsweek has previously reported on how low pay is one of the main reasons many educators are choosing to leave the profession.

“I’m a single woman, self-supporting, and the yearly ‘salary increases’ in my district never keep up with cost of living increases,” Jodi Turchin, a 12th grade English teacher in Florida, told Newsweek last year. “It makes it nearly impossible to save, and it’s only because I live simply that I don’t have to work multiple jobs in order to make ends meet.”

Meanwhile, legislators in some states have been looking for ways to encourage educators to stay in or return to the profession. Florida legislators are considering a bill that would help retired teachers return to work, and in Utah legislators have proposed giving out bonuses of $20,000 to some teachers.