Should the Legislature Allow Four-Day School Weeks? Absolutely!

The comments on this article appear to be largely opposed, but I say, “By all means!” This proposal wouldn’t force all districts to switch to a four-day schedule. Probably only a few rural districts would make the change. Compared to urban districts, rural districts operate under vastly different conditions, and it doesn’t make sense for them to send out fleets of buses over every hill and dale so that kids can spend a few hours in school — before starting off again on the long trip home.

The article mentions a district in Kentucky that has implemented the policy. There, high schoolers were trained to work as babysitters, and some families hired them on the day off of school. This example shows that functions of the public school can be provided by other sources. The fact that schools now watch kids five days a week doesn’t mean that no one else could step up to the plate if district calendars were different.

It’s true that, as one commenter points out, students in other parts of the world attend school six or seven days a week. It doesn’t follow, though, that a long week of short school days is a better schedule. In fact, some other countries have both long school weeks and long school days. Perhaps their educational attainments can be attributed to the long days, rather than the long weeks. The only way to find out whether longer or shorter weeks are better is to try them and see, and districts should be free to experiment.