Its safe to assume that all students would like to have shorter school weeks and it seems like this wish has been fulfilled for thousands of them! Many school districts have adopted the 4 day school week to attract more teachers and to effectively cut costs.
School District 27j in Brighton, Colorado is one of the 560 districts to cut its 5 day school week to 4 days. According to Superintendent Chris Fieder this will help to entice quality teachers to come and work in the district and allow for more resources to be used in other more important things in the district.
Their aim is to save around one million dollars. No substitute teachers and the bus working one day less the money they will save is estimated to be around $700,000.
Public information officer Tracy L. Rudnic said that with time these savings are only going to increase as the district finds ways to make this more efficient.
Even though one million is a small part of their operating budget, Rudnic is confident that with time they will see additional savings year after year. Every school in the district has a counselor now and they have rolled out their one-2-web program which gives every middle and high school student a Chromebook in their hands.
Additional benefits to this are that teachers will have more time to organize, prepare and further develop their lessons, effectively increasing the quality of education on offer.
A potential negative to this change is that low-income household might have difficulties paying for childcare on the days their children are free.
The officials say this will be a drastic change for everyone involved but it’s unreasonable to expect the district to do more with less finances.
It is also planned for the district to offer 30$ of childcare per child on Mondays. There are also some people concerned about the fact that more that children from low income household also rely on the food in the public school system.
Because of all this, the administrators need to consider other options before the decision of shortening the week like personnel layoffs, increasing the size of classes, reducing funding or cutting specific programs.
To maintain the level of education the other days of the week will be extended an hour or more and teachers that operate in these schools will have to work off one half day every month.
The schools are still confident that these changes are going to give children a higher quality education nonetheless.
Fielder assures us that they will provide the students with a competent education using 21st century tools for learning and the students will have highly dedicated and competent teachers four days a week, instead of having lower quality education five days a week.
Sources:
www.npr.org
www.cnbc.com