Interest grows in 4-day week for Iowa schools
By STACI HUPP •
shupp@dmreg.com • September 28, 2008
A growing number of Iowa school officials want the power to shorten the school week to four days, a cost-saving concept that has caught on in other states.
School officials in Van Buren County want a waiver from the mandatory state schools calendar so they can switch to a four-day week as soon as next year. Other educators who aren’t completely sold on the idea want state lawmakers to free them from the calendar’s confines, just in case.
In Iowa, the four-day week has found its biggest fans in the smallest school districts, where shrinking enrollment and historically high fuel costs have battered budgets.
School districts in 17 states run on a four-day schedule, national data show. In addition, Maine’s education department is considering submitting a bill for the 2009 legislative session that would allow districts to have four-day weeks.
In most of the states with the four-day school week, the length of the school day has grown from about 6 1/2 hours to eight hours.
“I just think it would be too much for kids to stay focused long enough,” said Liz Henning, a mother of two in Lehigh, which is in the Southeast Webster-Grand school district. “I think five days is better.”
No formal, comprehensive studies have been done in the United States on the effects of a shorter school week on students. However, officials in Arizona and Colorado have reported fewer absences among students and teachers who are on a four-day week. They also reported that the shorter school week was a good recruiting tool.
Districts in Arizona reported that while there were no noticeable gains in student achievement with the change to a shorter school week and longer school day, there also wasn’t a decrease in achievement. Some districts have offered tutoring to students on days when school is not in session. Others have offered teacher training.
Four-day weeks have caught on in budget-conscious governments across the country.
Utah required a four-day workweek for most state employees this summer. City governments in Maine are weighing a similar schedule for workers.
The topic is touchier for public schools, which are under pressure to raise academic performance.
In many cases, state laws give school districts the freedom to decide, said Heather Chikoore, a policy specialist with the National Conference of State Legislatures, which has offices in Denver and Washington, D.C.
The first schools to make the switch to four-day weeks were in New Mexico, as an energy crisis in the 1970s drove up transportation and utility bills, according to Southern Regional Education Board, a nonprofit policy group in Atlanta.
Schools in at least six states have moved to four-day schedules in the past five years, the Atlanta group’s research shows.
For rural Iowa schools, it’s a matter of money
Supporters in Iowa say keeping campuses dark, buses parked and cafeteria ovens cold for one day each week could save tens of thousands of dollars a year.
Officials in Southeast Webster-Grand, Henning’s school district, talked about the four-day schedule at a meeting last week. Officials in the Davis County Community School District also are exploring the idea.
The school districts have something in common besides small-town pride: extra long bus routes, which take a toll on school transportation budgets.
“Being a rural district, we basically bus in 70 percent of our kids, and so transportation is a big expense for us,” said Superintendent Mike Jorgensen of the Southeast Webster-Grand district, which is made up of seven communities.
“Any time that we can shave 20 percent of our expenses in one of our larger expenditure categories, we have to take a look at it.”
District officials say they want to study the four-day week before they endorse it. But Jorgensen has asked education lobbyists to push for the option in the next legislative session, which starts in January.
Officials in the Van Buren school district aren’t waiting. They’ll ask the Iowa Department of Education for an exception to the mandatory school calendar, which says students should be in school at least 5 1/2 hours a day and 180 days a year.
Superintendent Karen Stinson said transportation bills doubled this year to $738,000. The rural school district’s budget is about $9 million.
Stinson said money isn’t her only motivation. Students could use the extra day off to squeeze in job shadowing programs, community college credit and other opportunities they don’t have time for now, she said. “We think we could do some really unique things,” Stinson said.
What top state officials say about 4-day week
“There’s just a lot of pros and cons to it,” said Judy Jeffrey, who heads the state education department. “I think people have to think through all the implications, not just ‘I need to save money on transportation.’”
The state’s top education official hasn’t taken a public position on a four-day school week.
Gov. Chet Culver isn’t sold on the idea. Spokesman Troy Price said Culver would want to “see evidence that it has maintained or improved educational excellence while actually saving energy costs.”
However, education lobbyists support more wiggle room in Iowa’s mandatory school calendar. The current schedule “kind of constrains innovative practice,” said Jeff Berger, the education department’s legislative liaison. “It really is based on the farming schedule from the turn of the century. And we just think honestly you don’t have to be so restrictive.”
One approach is to set a minimum number of hours in the school year instead of days, Berger said.
Iowa’s neighbor to the west has used that approach since the 1980s. Nebraska high schools, for example, build their calendars around a minimum 1,080 hours.
About a half-dozen Nebraska school districts shortened their school weeks to four days, said Brian Hale, spokesman for the Nebraska Association of School Boards. Teacher contracts are based on a certain number of days, Hale said.
“You still have to pay the teachers the same amount,” Hale said. “There’s not a lot of savings in that, but when you look at the hard, fixed costs of turning on the lights and fueling the vehicles, there’s a thought that it does save some money for the schools.”
Officials in the Conestoga school district south of Omaha said a four-day week saves about $100,000 a year, much of it in bus fuel. The small district’s overall budget is about $10 million.
Superintendent Mark Sievering said the district switched after voters turned down a property tax increase more than two years ago.
Early on, pushback came from working parents, who didn’t want to be saddled with extra child care costs. Now, some have tailored their own work schedules to match the school’s, district officials said.
The week for middle and high school students runs from 7:55 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesday through Friday. Sievering said test scores haven’t suffered and attendance rates have soared.
Barb Minderman, a veteran fourth-grade teacher at Conestoga, said she initially predicted disaster for students with short attention spans.
Over time, Minderman went from an ardent critic to a fan.
“It’s probably a much fuller day academically than it was with the five-day week,” she said. “Maybe there’s just enough extra time that we’re able to be more consistently on task than we were. We don’t waste very much time.”
Interest grows in 4-day week for Iowa schools | DesMoinesRegister.com | The Des Moines Register
Interest grows in 4-day week for Iowa schools
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