This was interesting to me for a variety of reasons but one thing that caught me off guard was that some families were actually excited about this change. I would’ve assumed there would be panic as they tried to arrange daycare, etc.
There have been school districts moving towards 4 day weeks for a while as they face budget cuts. I’m curious as to what parents who have (or had) school age children think about this.
Again, please don’t make this about the politics behind this.
I don’t think I’d like a four-day week for my kids. Maybe only because it’s not what I’m used to. I can see how the teachers might like it, but I suspect it doesn’t help learning very much. (The article said test scores improve the first year of four-day school but decline in subsequent years.)
Personally, I think it would be tough on a lot of kids to retain knowkedge if they were in schoool 4 days and off 3. It would be ok for independent learners but tough for those who need the most reinforcement and resources they can’t get at home.
It would be especially bad for kids who get free breakfast and lunch at school due to low income. Thus would mean they only get feee food for 8 meals instead of 10 for the week.
They’re going to “make-up” the hours by adding hours to the end of the days.
I used to work in a 1st grade classroom. The idea of making children stay even longer than they already do is sadly laughable. You just can’t get kids to focus for that long. It’ll just be more play time (which is fine! I think elementary kids need more play, but it’s less learning time.)
It could cause day care problems for younger kids. For kids old enough not to need a babysitter, 4 days a week doesn’t seem any more or less arbitrary than having class 5 days a week. Kids go to school 5 days a week because that corresponds to most parent’s schedules, not because 5 days a week has been proven as optimal for learning.
Agree that for many, finding and affording an extra day of care every week will be a costly problem as well, either that or there will be a lot of unsupervised kids around on days with no school.
Also agree that young kids can focus only so long. Making them stay at school longer each day doesn’t improve the learning conditions or environment. Hopefully it won’t create an increase in the # of kids diagnosed with ADD or ADHD.
Yes. They said there is going to be “low cost” $30 daycare on Friday (seems like a type of latchkey?). That $30 PER WEEK is not something that poor families can afford. It’s just not
$30/wk is $120+/month. That’s a big part of the the grocery bill for families. If they’re already struggling, where will they dig up $30/week more? It’s probably MUCH cheaper for families who have a few kids to combine with others and hire one (or two) adult(s) than this $30/week per kid.
Our state implemented an after school program at low cost with sliding fee scale --kids are supervised with peers on school campus or the program picks them up and buses them. They are supervised while doing homework and playing. Lots of the folks supervising are training to be teachers. Back in the day over a decade ago, I think the max cost was $35/month for 1st kid and discount for additional kids of same family in program. They even took kids on field trips, showed movies, and generally kept the kids engaged. The program ran from when school ended each day until 5pm. For school holidays, parents could pay an extra charge and the kids could be supervised then as well.
Agree that going to a 4 day workweek will make it hard for parents for many reasons including childcare logistics for really young elementary school kids and the free school lunch programs.
Unfortunately, this is what happens when public education is underfunded and teachers offered such low wages that many jump ship for better paying states/areas.
Also, this won’t surprise one friend who is a permanent transplant from Oklahoma(she permanently relocated to the NYC area after HS). This very underfunding and the prevailing local politics involved behind it is one major reason why she left.
I am not so sure about that considering school days are on average longer in other countries.
For instance, relatives and HS classmates who attended K-6 or K-12 in the ROC(Taiwan) recounted starting their school days as early as 7 am and not leaving school till 5 pm*. And when my parents/older relatives attended K-12 in the 50s, they had to attend school 6 days a week. Yes, Saturday was a normal school day back then(this practice ceased sometime in the late '60s/'70s.
My parents and older relatives were shocked when they first arrived in the US to find K-12 students not only only had to attend classes 5 days a week rather than 6, but also got dismissed 2 hours earlier at 3 pm.
Then again, length of time in class isn’t everything as it also depends on how well that time is utilized by the teachers, students, curricula, etc.
Granted, they did have recess, PE classes, and civil defense training(Middle/HS) as well.
In our state, public school is 8 until 2 and on Wednesdays it ends at 1 or earlier so teachers can have a meeting. Private school runs 7:45-3pm M-F at most schools. The private school kids end up with hours more of school every week. This compounds every year, creating a significant gap.
Extracurricular activities are after school hours, of course.
Some of that is due to the long historical neglect of public schools in HI by the local ruling elite for decades because they viewed public schools there as “only” for the lower SES and Native Hawaiians/Asian/other non-Whites while the local ruling elite sent their kids to private/boarding schools in Hawaii or on the US Mainland.
This very “tradition” was one key reason why my Hawaii-based relatives and the neighbors in their upper-middle class Oahu neighborhood(Near Diamondhead) would never even think of enrolling their children in the local public schools for K-12…or the public colleges for that matter including the flagship UH Manoa*.
There was the common mentality that any OOS school on the US mainland was better than what's on the Islands.
Our kids went to public school K-8. They transferred for HS. The private HS my S and D attended had more NMFs the year S graduated in its graduating class of about 200 than the rest of the state combined. Our kids were very well prepared to attend the college of their choice.
We had wanted and tried to keep our kids in public school but middle school was very tough for them. The faculty wouldn’t communicate with the kids OR parents and D was forced to repeat her exact same math book 2 years in a row for two consecutive grades and was going to have it for a 3rd year but I successfully fought them. After that we and the kids opted for them to go to private HS.
Very few kids I know attend private boarding school but it is true that many folks do send their kids to private school if they have any way of affording the tuition. There are need-based scholarships. Generally, no disciplinary problems because kids know they can be expelled.
My nephew started school on a 4 day schedule. He lived in a mountain town and this meant the school buses only had to run 4 days a week and they only had to heat the schools 4 days per week. It also allowed the kids who skied to do so over a long weekend, either practicing on Monday or traveling to other areas for weekend races and not missing school.
One of the country day schools here didn’t have school on Friday afternoons. This allowed everyone to take their ‘enrichment’ classes or go to the dentist or leave for a long weekend. Money wasn’t the issue at this school.
Out of curiosity, was the private school Iolani or Punahou?
One key factor which many immigrant parents and classmates who initially attended school in their nations of origin found and frequently mentioned was how US teachers are saddled with dealing with greater levels of classroom disciplinary issues/problems without having the policies/parental/admin support to handle them to the same degree as teachers in their origin countries. Consequently, most of them found US K-12 classrooms…even at well-off suburban publics and some private schools to be much more chaotic than would be the norm in their countries of origin*.
In Japan, if students are too noisy/disruptive, teachers…including public school teachers have the unilateral right to cancel lessons until the students and parents apologized for the noisy/disruptive behavior and come up with an agreement to police themselves…and expect to be held to it by the teacher/school admins who have the teacher’s back in this area.
In the ROC(Taiwan) during the period my parents/aunts/uncles/few older cousins attended K-8/12, noisy/disruptive students are subject to serious disciplinary action by school principals/admins and could be expelled for repeated offenses (with some reasonable allowances for the child’s age/expected maturity level) and middle/HS student discipline is “outsourced” to civil defense training officials who tend to be military officers/NCOs stationed at the HS who keep records on male students who will be liable for mandatory military service once they graduate HS.
Incidentally, this very factor was one major factor in why a great-aunt who decided to volunteer the first few retirement years to teach HS physics in a well-off Long Island suburb in the '70s after a decades long-career as a Physics Prof at a respectable US public U who was well liked/respected by undergrad/grad students decided to quit teaching HS after just a few years.
She found the high school students to be too unruly, chaotic, and rude compared with HS students in her country of origin or the undergrad/grad students at her university. Her sons recounted most of the students from that HS felt she expected “too much work” and was “too strict”.
Assessments both of her sons who were both born in the US sometime in the late '40s/early '50s felt was much more indicative of the much more lax disciplinary standards/expectations of that suburban public HS, the students & their parents, and the general period(Hey…it was the 1970’s) compared to the expectations they experienced just a decade or two before at another Long Island suburban public HS.
When I went to boarding school in England, the actual school day went from some typical morning hour until 5 or 6 pm. We had assembly in the morning, followed by classes until lunch. They we had a rest for half an hour, followed by a couple of hours of sports and other activities, such as theater productions. Then we changed into our evening uniforms for tea, followed by two more classes before dinner. I believe that this was a fairly typical schedule, even for day schools. (We had day pupils also.)
An additional colorful detail: we were awakened at about 7am by a gong. We dressed in shorts, sneakers, and an aertex shirt–throughout the winter, I might add, with no additional clothing–and were led on a morning run before we changed into our day uniforms for breakfast.
I loved that place.
When S was in elementary school, they had early closing on Wednesdays. The teachers used the after lunch hours for planning, meeting, training, etc. I loved having more daylight hours with S in which to do other things, but I was a SAHM most of that time, and when I did have a job I could arrange my hours to make it work.
