The Four-Day School Week

School Administrator, March, 1999 by Kimberly Reeves

The four-day week was the ultimatum offered to voters in a tax referendum election 16 years ago in the 1,100-student East Grand School District in Granby, Colo., the largest district in the state on a four-day week. Located in ski resort areas outside Park City, the school system cut $206,000 in transportation, personnel and substitute costs out of the district's annual $5.5 million budget as a result of the change, former superintendent Gary Sibigtroth says.

The chief reason for the significant savings was that the district chose to take Monday off. The heating and air conditioning systems could be shut down on Friday at noon and not be turned back on until early Tuesday morning.

"The decision kept us from eliminating programs," says Sibigtroth, who now works as a field supervisor in the Colorado Department of Education. "That money we saved kept us from cutting existing programs from the budget."

Just how much a shortened school week can save a district is unclear. However, the cardinal rule for money crunching under the four-day week is to make it accomplish something important for the district, says Joe Newlin, executive director of the National Rural Education Association at Colorado State University.

"You don't cut the money simply to cut it," Newlin says. "You've got to take that money and put it back into staff development or other programs that are favored by the parents. It would be programs that the parents want, but the school would not be able to afford unless they had cost savings in that area."

Twenty years after the oil crunch, only one school district in New Mexico has left the four-day calendar and that was because the school district exceeded the enrollment cap, says McCoy of the state education agency. Once scorned, the four-day week now enjoys popularity in New Mexico that far outstrips that of other alternative schedules, such as year-round education.

A Tough Fight

Superintendent Newell Cleaver knew he would have critics when he shifted the 1,000 students in the Grant School District in eastern Oregon to a four-day calendar two years ago. He didn't expect the opposition to be led by two retired superintendents living in the area, one of them a 20-year veteran of Cleaver's own district.

A community committee had spent a year exploring the new schedule. The four-day school week made a lot of sense in the district. The cost cutting would allow the district to maintain its current programming and low student-teacher ratios. The schedule would be an advantage in teacher recruitment. And the school district was already on a 4.5-day week, a common option for small school districts in Oregon.

Retired educators and administrators, however, were adamant, Cleaver says. The critics would simply not accept the fact the alternative schedule would help, not hurt, student learning. Emotional opponents showed up in force at board meetings. They collected 1,000 signatures on a community petition to derail early support for the change. The school district countered with 1,000 parent surveys, most of them expressing support. Egos and emotion, more than rational arguments and factual statements on the new calendar, dominated the debate, Cleaver says.