Virginia district contemplates four-day school week, anticipates parent disapproval

A district in Virginia has proposed a four-day school week “to save money, alleviate staffing shortages and prioritize mental health,” Gray Media’s WDBJ7 reports.

Under initial terms, the revised schedule would start on Tuesdays and make each school day longer by about an hour, Franklin County Public Schools said.

“It allows us to do a lot more of the things during the school day, so to speak, that right now are getting sort of shunted to after-hours, when it’s oftentimes a lot harder to fit those things in,” said Shannon Brooks, a high school English and journalism teacher. “Specifically, I’m thinking in terms like planning, grading, parent phone calls.”

At the same time, Brooks acknowledges parents may be less than enthusiastic about the proposal.

“There are definite concerns about how this would impact student achievement,” she noted. “And the short answer is that we simply don’t know. It seems like the benefits to student achievement are pretty minimal.”

Jeff Worley, the district’s school board chairman and a parent, discussed transportation issues stemming from a longer day.

“Franklin County is a big county. We have children that are on the bus 45 minutes to an hour one way, anyway,” he said. “To have that extended further into the day is an absolute concern, and I get that.”

He also highlighted childcare as a primary challenge.

“Not everybody has access to childcare,” he observed. “It’s hard to find. Not everybody has access to family members that can automatically help them when they need it.”

The district enrolls approximately 6,000 students pre-K through 12th grade across 14 schools.

“It affects students and it affects families,” Brooks concluded, “but on a day-to-day basis, this is where the rubber is going to hit the road.”

‘Where’s your data?’

As previously reported by The Lion, staffing and financial challenges have spurred approximately 1,000 districts in 26 states to switch to a four-day schedule.

However, community advocates often oppose these efforts, arguing the disadvantages outweighed any benefits.

“The only things they showed as positives were anecdotal,” said Virginia Mahn, a parent protesting the Florence-Carlton district’s four-day school week in rural Montana. “It’d be an article from a superintendent that was like, ‘This is great for us.’ OK, so where’s your data?”

So far, research on shortened school weeks has tended to yield negative results related to academic performance.

“Based on student testing data from 2008 to 2023, (a University of Montana) study found that student learning suffered in the four-day school week,” observed the Hechinger Report.

Additionally, costs increased as teacher salaries and other services tended to rise or remain the same, according to the study.

“Student achievement is never part of the conversation,” said Bill McCaw, one of the study’s authors. “Day care, convenience, longer vacation – all that’s being discussed. But not student achievement.”