The Four-Day School Week

School Administrator, March, 1999 by Kimberly Reeves

Originally intended for cost savings, the shorter week struggles now to find academic benefits, too

Bill Coker was handed a mandate just short of a suicide mission when he took his new job in 1994 as superintendent of a rural New Mexico school district: Put the district on a four-day work week and get our technology bond issue passed, his board demanded.

Located in southwestern part of the state near the Arizona border, the Animas Public Schools sit in a farm and ranch community so isolated that residents have to buy a satellite dish to watch network television. The nearest doctor is 80 miles away. Trustees in Animas, like rural school boards in many Western states, had flirted with the four-day school week at least three times during the previous eight years, but nothing had come of it, Coker says. As soon as trustees felt the heat each time, they backed away.

Chief among the reasons to reconsider the truncated work schedule was a condition most school leaders would dub the "Friday football flu." Four-day school weeks were initiated in the early '70s in New Mexico to defray energy costs, but many rural school districts have chosen the same calendar in recent years to cut the high cost of travel time. Pick any Friday in a rural school community during football season--or basketball or baseball season, for that matter--and half the high school's students would be on a bus traveling to an away game.

By default, every Friday afternoon became a case of chronic spring flu in Animas. Those students and teachers who were left on the high school campus would be stuck in idle. The cost in lost productivity--and increased student and teacher frustration--was high. It was no wonder families picked the last day of the school week to visit the doctor, head out for the long drive to shop in Las Cruces or even skip school to follow the sports teams on the road, Coker says.

So the Animas school board once again decided to tackle the four-day school week. Coker asked the board members if they were serious. Selling the community on the notion of a four-day school week--especially as a new superintendent--was not going to be an easy task, he told them. Coker wasn't far from wrong, he soon discovered.

Board members, the superintendent says, "had been given several stories why they couldn't. They were told they were too large to go to [a four-day week]. ... I told them we could do it, but we would have to win the community to pursue it.

Vocal Opposition

The first meeting to discuss the proposed schedule drew 100 parents packed into the high school auditorium in the 600-student district. The 40 who rose to harshly criticized the idea and complained the four-day week was not academically sound. Babysitting children on the fifth day would be difficult, they told Coker, even though most of the town was on a four-day work schedule at a local copper smelter. The 60 parents who were neutral or favored the proposal were absolutely silent, Coker remembers with a laugh.

"It was one of the hardest things I've ever done because the parents were so adamant about the issues," Coker says. "I had one parent who called everyone from the state school board to the governor's office trying to prevent it."

Not one school board member was in the audience that first night. Even the three administrators Coker brought with him were silent. No one had experience with the four-day calendar. Coker knew the hidden deal-breaker was the babysitting. Parents admitted privately they liked their four-day work week, but they weren't necessarily ready to share that day off with their children.

But Coker had some factors in his favor. The new superintendent had served as the high school principal in Animas for four years in the 1980s. In the interim, he had led a smaller district on a four-day calendar in eastern New Mexico. And now his school board seemed committed to seriously considering the calendar option.

"The only reason I survived was that I had been there before," Coker admits. "I wasn't a superintendent from nowhere. I had worked in this district."

Animas moved forward with the four-day week. That was four years ago. The first year, the community survey on the move was split 60-40. That percentage has shifted. The approval rating for the four-day week now hovers around 80 percent.

"The tide has turned," Coker says. "Of course, you always have those parents that didn't want their kids at home in the first place. You're never going to get them over to your side."

A Financial Basis

There was nothing noble or high-minded about the birth of the four-day school week. It was driven by the need to save money. The alternative schedule, first introduced in 1972 in Cimarron, N.M., was intended to cut transportation costs and electric bills during the energy crisis. Under the calendar, the fifth day of instruction of any given week was pared into fourths and tacked onto the end of the remaining four weekdays. The schedule was especially attractive to rural districts, where school children were spending up to four hours on a bus each day.