Educators pushed for flexibility while parents worried about how changing to a four-day school week would impact their kids during a heated Little Elm school board meeting this month.
The growing Denton County district was among the latest in Texas to consider such calendars as schools balance staffing challenges with student needs.
Teacher Addison Maxwell urged the trustees to shorten the week, saying teacher shortages meant he had to suddenly leave his kindergartners just weeks into the start of the school year to help fill gaps in another grade. The district wouldn’t struggle so much with attracting more educators if it offered a better work-life balance, he added.
“I was their first teacher,” he said during Tuesday’s board meeting. “That was traumatic.”
Little Elm trustees backed away from the idea for now, but more districts — mostly small and rural ones — are moving to four-day weeks. Just this month, Anna and Terrell adopted the switch for next school year.
About 40 Texas districts are on a four-day week, with more than a dozen launching the schedule this school year, according to estimates from the Texas Classroom Teachers Association.
Smaller rural school districts tend to make the move because they struggle more with recruiting teachers and their families often face long commutes to campus, said Kevin Brown, executive director of the Texas Association of School Administrators.
“It’s definitely a local decision,” he said. “A community has to figure out what works best for them.”
The need to compete
Georgeanne Warnock stepped into the Terrell schools superintendent role just before the pandemic hit, and even then she noticed the increased demand placed on teachers.
By January 2021, the district had community support to pivot to four and a half days a week.
But the move didn’t provide educators with as much time as they really needed, so Terrell went back to a five-day week this year. Still, leaders of the 5,220-student district about 30 miles east of Dallas needed a fix to recruit and retain teachers.
This month, Terrell trustees approved the new instructional week, which will run Monday through Thursday starting in August.
“We have to compete with some of the larger districts that are our neighbors,” Warnock said. Major suburban districts have average salaries nearly $10,000 more than rural districts, according to state data.
Warnock hopes the new school week will also improve attendance for students and faculty alike, as they have Fridays to take care of personal business such as doctor appointments.
Crystal Boyd, the mother of a Terrell high school student, is excited about the change. Students as well as teachers need more of a mental break, she said. She expects her daughter to use the extra day off to read, catch up on schoolwork or just take time for herself.
“All kids need a mental break from school. There’s going to be benefits,” Boyd said.
Are four-day school weeks worth it?
Not all parents support such moves.
In Little Elm, for example, one mom told trustees she worried that leaving teenagers unsupervised for a whole day could lead them to engage in criminal activity. Others worried about students’ education taking a hit, test scores dropping, and having to look for child care if the district takes the leap.
One 2022 study found that four-day weeks could lead to drops in math and reading scores if the overall amount of time in classes was too low compared with those that maintained sufficient school time within the remaining days. Researchers from Oregon State University and Rand Corp. examined schools with such schedules across a dozen states for the study.
Texas requires at least 75,600 minutes of teaching time each school year. However, public schools have flexibility in setting up calendars.
So if a district cuts a day, it must then increase daily schedules by about an hour on average or extend the school year to make up the time.
Nationwide, more than 1,600 schools across 24 states have embraced four-day school weeks, according to a study published in 2021.
Some studies suggest four-day weeks can help cut costs and improve student attendance. A Rand survey published in 2021, for example, found savings on hourly staff salaries and transportation.
However, savings are typically minimal. The survey focused on three states with higher numbers of districts with such schedules — Idaho, New Mexico and Oklahoma. It found schools reported only up to 3% in savings in their overall budgets.
Although the potential move to a four-day week dominated Little Elm’s board meeting, trustees are reluctant to make a decision before finding the district’s next school leader.
Little Elm Superintendent Daniel Gallagher announced in November his plans to retire at the end of this year.
If Gallagher’s successor chooses to pursue a four-day week, the option would become open for discussion and development, trustee David Montemayor said.
Brown, the executive director of the school administrators group, said such decisions aren’t taken lightly because school leaders must think about how to successfully roll it out and support children from families where both parents work.
And once the new calendar is in place, administrators must monitor whether students continue to see the same academic growth they would during a traditional five-day week.
“It’s obviously a really big decision to make,” he said. “It doesn’t have to be a permanent decision. You can see how things are progressing and pull it back if it’s not working well.”
The DMN Education Lab deepens the coverage and conversation about urgent education issues critical to the future of North Texas.
The DMN Education Lab is a community-funded journalism initiative, with support from Bobby and Lottye Lyle, Communities Foundation of Texas, The Dallas Foundation, Dallas Regional Chamber, Deedie Rose, Garrett and Cecilia Boone, The Meadows Foundation, The Murrell Foundation, Solutions Journalism Network, Southern Methodist University, Sydney Smith Hicks and the University of Texas at Dallas. The Dallas Morning News retains full editorial control of the Education Lab’s journalism.
