School Schedules Part 3 - Four Day School Week

The below post is the third in a series of post dealing with alternatives to the traditional school calendar and school day.

An article by the Center for Public Education...

A scheduling strategy that has been adopted by some rural school districts is to drop the fifth day of instruction by adding time to the remaining four weekdays (Yarbrough and Gilman, 2006). A few hundred districts in Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Kansas, Louisiana, New Mexico, Oregon, South Dakota, Wisconsin, and Wyoming have implemented this schedule, primarily for fiscal reasons (cutting down on transportation costs). An unforeseen bonus is that the schedule has unexpected educational and morale benefits for both students and staff.

Documented Benefits

1. Increased scores on all areas of the Comprehensive Test of Basic Skills for two consecutive years.
2. Increased scores on the state assessment for two consecutive years.
3. Decreased suspensions and code-of-conduct violations.
4. Improved response to behavior management strategies for special education students with behavioral issues.
5. Increased collaboration and planning among teachers, which in turn improved academic rigor and lesson preparation.
6. More core content covered during the school year.

Read more HERE.