Four-day school weeks?

I don't know about anyone else, but I'll bet the kids in Lancaster are rooting for this.

The Lancaster school district has asked the Texas Education Agency for clearance to implement a four-day schedule for the upcoming school year.

The superintendent for the 6,000-student district, which is located south of Dallas, argues the plan would boost academics and could save as much as $1.9 million, helping to close a funding deficit in this year's budget.

But some parents have protested the idea over concerns about the cost of child care on Fridays and unsupervised students getting into trouble.

The Lancaster school board voted 5-1 last week to allow Superintendent Larry Lewis to seek a waiver exempting the district from the required 180-day school calendar.

The district filed the waiver request with the state on Friday and is expected to make its case to the TEA within a week.

Let's put aside the issue of childcare, which is pretty much intractable and a more than sufficient reason for the state to say No to this. (There's also a deadline that the school district might not have met, but that's boring.) The question I have is how do you fit a 180-day curriculum into 144 days? Answer: Longer school days.

The proposal calls for school days that some might consider epic. Elementary students would be in class from 7:45 a.m. to 4:25 p.m. High school classes would stretch from 8:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., longer than many adults' workdays.

Those are pretty long days for schoolkids. I know I didn't have that kind of attention span when I was that age. It's not at all clear to me that this would serve the students well, as much as they might like the three-day weekends.

Four-day school weeks are uncommon. The first school to adopt one did so to cut costs during the energy crisis in 1972. A 2003 survey by the National Association of School Boards found that only about 100 of the roughly 15,000 school districts nationwide had four-day weeks.

They exist almost entirely in rural areas, mostly in Colorado and New Mexico. That's because a four-day week means one fewer day of bus service - a major expense in districts that cover large swaths of territory. Children often work on the family farm or ranch on their extra day off.

"It worries me how it would work in an urban context," said Bob Richburg, a professor emeritus of education at Colorado State. He started studying four-day weeks more than 20 years ago.

[...]

In a presentation to board members Monday, Dr. Lewis said four-day weeks brought a "documented increase in student achievement." But Dr. Richburg says that's not true. His own study comparing four- and five-day districts in Colorado found no gains.

"I just think they're trying to find something to justify a position they want to take for other reasons," he said.

The actual proposal is here, and there's a lot more background on this here. One more piece of the puzzle is here.

In November 2005, Panther Creek ISD, a rural district in Central Texas with fewer than 200 students, requested a waiver so it could switch to a four-day school week.

Then-commissioner Shirley Neeley rejected the proposal because she felt she didn't have enough time to rule on it and feared that launching a four-day week in the middle of the school year would be disruptive, TEA spokeswoman Suzanne Marchman said.

Four-day schedules are rare, but they are more common in small, rural districts, such as Panther Creek, than larger districts such as Lancaster.

Panther Creek, which is 70 miles east of San Angelo, covers 563 square miles and had just 194 students during the 2005-06 school year. Lancaster ISD, in a suburb south of Dallas, had 6,068 students last school year.

No precedent, lots of legitimate concerns, no evidence this would be good for students - I think I agree with the DMN editorial board when they say to flush this idea. There may be a place for this kind of thing, but I don't think it's in Lancaster ISD.

Posted by Charles Kuffner on July 25, 2007 to The great state of Texas