Kids Win Too on 4-Day School Week

Like good principals everywhere, Janet Liddle tries to keep up on the activities of the 197 students here at Granby Elementary School. From Monday through Thursday that’s fairly easy, but Fridays are tough.

“Well, about half of them will be on the ski slopes on a Friday,” Liddle says. “A bunch might be at a concert, and some of them just take off somewhere with their parents.”

The student body disperses every Friday because Granby Elementary, on a snowy plateau at the headwaters of the Colorado River, has a four-day school week. With the economic downturn and stiff new limits on state and federal education budgets, other districts, particularly in the rural West, are following suit, shutting down one day a week to cut costs.

More than 100 school districts in seven states -- Oregon, Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico, South Dakota, Arkansas and Louisiana -- are using the four-day week this school year, according to the National School Boards Assn.

Districts in an additional half a dozen states are considering the plan for next year, although some would require a change in state law to make the shift.

“You get an immediate 20% cut in your food services budget, 20% in transportation and some savings in energy and custodial costs,” said Robb Rankin, superintendent of the East Grand School District, which operates Granby Elementary and four schools on the four-day plan. East Grand is more experienced with the four-day plan than most: It started the compacted schedule in 1982, after Colorado rewrote its annual educational requirements in response to the energy crisis of the late ‘70s.

“We’ve also had improvement in attendance,” Rankin said, mainly because parents schedule the dentist or the eye exam on Friday instead of taking students out of school. “That’s pretty important in a mountain district like this one, because some of the kids have to make a four-hour round trip to Denver to see the orthodontist. We also schedule our teacher training and parent-teacher conferences on Fridays so they don’t take away a school day.”

The trade-off is that students in the four-day system have to go to school 7.5 hours a day to get the same instruction that the standard five-day, six-hour schedule provides. That means even 6-year-old first-graders have to be in class from 8:15 a.m. to 4:15 p.m. each day. “We always schedule art, music or PE as the last hour of the day,” Liddle said, “because the younger students do get tired.”

Because the four-day schedule has been adopted mainly in small, rural school districts, there are no large-scale studies yet of the educational effect of the shortened week. But state officials in Colorado, with 47 districts on the four-day system, said there is no indication that learning has suffered.

“We don’t have a systematic comparison of student performance,” said Gary Sibigtroth, the state’s assistant commissioner of education.

“But we are seeing the same improvement on standardized tests in the four-day schools that we have had in the traditional schools. This system has been extremely popular with parents; about 80% say they like the four-day plan. It would not be if there were any sign that education was suffering.”

Last week, Colorado Gov. Bill Owens issued a report card on each of the state’s public schools. The results showed no difference in student achievement between four-day and five-day systems, the state said.